Carpark panic
Monday 9th March 2009
For once, luck was on our side. The sun was shining, our 10-day-old daughter, Paige, was gurgling in her baby seat and our son, Zack, 2, was sitting quietly next to her.
Better still, as we pulled into the car park at James Hamilton Heritage Park, in East Kilbride,
I spotted loads of empty spaces.
'Brilliant,' I grinned to my fiancé, Fraser Jeffcott, 25. 'We'll have no trouble parking.'
Fraser squeezed my hand.
'I told you things would be OK,' he smiled.
We hadn't had the easiest few weeks. When I was 34 weeks pregnant, I'd been told I was carrying the virus, group b streptococcus.
'It's not life-threatening,' the doctor had said. 'But you might pass it
on to the baby.'
When Paige was born, she'd been given penicillin and that night, we'd taken her home. But then she'd turned blue and floppy and we'd raced her to back to hospital, where she'd been kept in intensive care for three terrifying days. Thankfully, she'd recovered well. But by the time we'd got home, poor Zack hadn't seen me for nearly 10 days. He was so excited to see me and his new sister, he'd been racing around the house like a mad thing
all morning, which is why we'd come to the park for some fresh air.
Fraser drove our blue Skoda towards one of the empty spaces and pulled on
the handbrake. 'I'll grab Zack and the buggy out of the back,' I said, opening the back passenger door on the right, where Zack was sitting.
'I'll get my bike out of the boot,' Fraser replied.
He was just opening it when I heard a loud revving behind us.
I spun around to see a blue car pointing towards the space on our right. There was a man who looked about 60 sat in the driver's seat, his face twisted with anger.
'I think he wants the space next to us,' I said, spotting Zack's buggy jutting over the yellow line that divided the two spaces.
'But there are loads of other spaces,' Fraser frowned.
I smiled nervously at the man.
'We'll only be a couple of minutes,' I mouthed, as I fumbled around with Zack's seatbelt.
Fraser reached into the car to get Paige, who was in her car seat on the driver's side. Just as he lifted her out, the revving practically deafened us, and I looked up to see the car lurch into the space next to us, straight towards Paige.
It was as though everything happened in slow motion.
The deafening sound of the engine… The crunch as our right wing mirror was bent backwards by the car… The look of horror on Fraser's face as he gripped Paige's car seat… My bloodcurdling scream as the car headed for her… Fraser's knuckles going white as he held onto the car seat handle for dear life
'Get out the way!' the bloke shouted through his open window, as terror surged through my body.
By now, his face had turned red as a beetroot and he was shouting all the insults under the sun as he punched the inside of his car windows.
'Mummy!' Zack screamed.
'It's OK,' I said, holding him close.
But as the car engine stopped and the man flung open his door and climbed out, it was anything but OK.
He was shouting and swearing so much, the vein in his forehead looked as if it was about to burst.
'What the hell do you think you're doing? Fraser raged. 'You could have killed our baby.'
'You were in the way!' the
man ranted.
As I raced over to make sure Paige was OK, Fraser took a deep breath.
'Why are you behaving like this?' he asked.
The abuse continued.
I couldn't make sense of what the man was saying, it just came out in one long stream.
'There's no point reasoning with him,'
I sighed, as I focused
on his number plate.
So Fraser threw his hands in the air, and finally, the man got back in his car and screeched off.
By then, both Zack and Paige were crying and I was shaking. I checked Paige over and she seemed OK. The man's car had been just an inch from hitting her.
Back at home, my fear turned to anger.
'He's not getting away
with this,' I said to Fraser.
'I'm calling the police.'
Last December, Dugald Moffat, 60, appeared at Hamilton Sheriff's Court.
He pleaded not guilty to dangerous driving and breach of the peace.
Just seeing his face again made my blood boil.
I listened as Sheriff Marie Smart described his attack as 'the worst piece of road rage' she had seen.
Moffat just stood there staring straight ahead as the court heard he was so determined to get his parking space, he'd swapped places with his wife, Margaret, so that he could drive. To top it all off, he had no insurance to drive the car, plus
a string of previous convictions including three for traffic offences.
In his defence, the court heard he suffered from anxiety. That was rich coming from someone who'd turned me into a nervous wreck!
I was over the moon when, at the sentencing this January, the judge found him guilty of dangerous driving and breach of the peace, and he was fined £500 for each offence.
I still can't believe someone could get so angry over a parking space. And it doesn't bear thinking about what could have happened if Fraser hadn't kept such a tight grip on our daughter's car seat. n
By Elizabeth Hotson and
Shelley Matheson
pickmeup@ipcmedia.com