A motorist foiled a brazen armed highway robbery in Chile by using his vehicle to send one of the criminals who tried to force him to stop airborne.
When highway bandits tried to block a freeway entrance ramp with their car and one emerged with a handgun ordering him to stop, the motorist accelerated through a narrow gap between the thieves’ vehicle and a guard rail — plowing one of them over the rail and down the slope below.
The two perpetrators were dressed in black and wearing masks when they emerged from their Audi as it screeched to a halt.
Seconds before the hold-up, a woman passenger was overheard saying, “They say this area is kind of dangerous,” according to the Daily Mail’s translation of her comment from Spanish.
“You were right,” the other apparently said moments after the incident.
The drama over the weekend in Quilicura, a surburb of Santiago, Chile’s capital.
The driver later told a Chilean radio station that they had been talking about their suspicions of the would-be thieves’ Audi in front of them before the drama unfolded.
“I’d picked up on the fact there were several people inside and they were going fast,” he said, according to the Mail account. “I’d accelerated a bit to put some distance between us when I first saw it behind me, and it accelerated even more and got in front of me. I reckon I must have been going between 50mph and 60mph when I ran the guy over.”
He added, ‘When I saw one of them getting out holding a weapon, my only intention was to escape that situation.”
When the driver reported the incident to police, authorities told him the Audi they had used was found abandoned nearby. Police also said five men in the same vehicle were suspects in an attempted retail robbery that same day.
Locals call the highway holdups “encerronas,” Spanish for traps or ambushes. They are common during both the day and the night in the area, according to authorities.
Contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the best-selling author of the Los Angeles crime novel Below the Line and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.
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