A Calgary woman no longer feel safe in her own home, after she was not only carjacked — but the alleged criminals then came to her house and stole a second vehicle.
Queensland resident Jaimie Pidlubny says she was running errands on Sunday afternoon in the area of First Street S.W. and 25th Avenue.
“I was approached by two guys with a knife and was told to get out of my car,” says Pidlubny.
“I just didn’t believe it was happening.”
She said as one of the suspects got behind the wheel, she managed to punch him in back a couple times through an open window before the two got away with her Jeep Cherokee.
“In my mind, the whole time I was trying to prolong in hopes that somebody saw out their house window and called 911,” Pidlubny said.
Hours later, she remembered she hadn’t just lost her Jeep — her purse was in it, along with her other family vehicle’s keys and her Apple Airpods.
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So, she grabbed her phone.
“There was a ping, I had an address,” she said. “It was ten minutes old, (so) I called the police.”
She tracked the Airpods to an address on Marbank Drive S.E. in the community of Marlborough.
As police circled around the area, Pidlubny got another ping on her phone —this time, the Airpods were heading south on Deerfoot Trail.
Unbeknownst to Pidlubny, the Airpods were on the way to her Queensland home — the suspects had the keys to her truck and that’s what they were after.
“Someone drove up in my car, dropped off someone, got in the truck and drove away in slow motion in front of the house,” she said.
“There goes the truck and the car.”
Police said the two suspects were driving separate stolen vehicles. With the help of HAWCS and the canine unit, police covertly followed the vehicles from Queensland to a gas station, where the suspects were arrested.
Police say the accused are 14- and 17-year-olds who now face multiple charges including robbery, theft of a motor vehicle, and failure to comply.
Mount Royal University criminologist Doug King said given the ages of the offenders, the incident is likely tied to organized crime.
“They already had one car, so that tells me that there was a third party at works saying, ‘Here’s the keys to the other vehicle, now you two go and get that other vehicle.’”
King wonders why the two didn’t wait until the evening — adding the entire situation was so calculated, it’s disturbing.
“It just goes to show that they weren’t thinking very much about the consequences about what they were doing. They were being told to do it by someone in authority, so they went and did it,” King said.
The entire ordeal has left Jaime still reeling.
“Not only are they taking material things from me, but they’re robbing me of the safety in my own home,” she said as she wept.
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