UYO: For Estelle DeSouza, Thursday morning was supposed to be uneventful. She had left her home for a quick errand, certain she would be back in less than an hour. Instead, she returned shaken, in tears, and grateful to be alive.
“I’m still crying and shaking from the event of this morning,” she said, recalling how a stranger tried to drag her into his car on Aka Road in Uyo.
According to Estelle, the man had first stopped to ask for directions. When she declined his request for her phone number and walked away, he suddenly grabbed her and loudly accused her of being his fiancée who had “dumped him” after he paid her way through school.
“I kept shouting, ‘I don’t know you, leave me alone!’” she recounted. “But instead of helping, people around began to believe him. A woman even said she knew ‘my type,’ and tricycle riders dismissed it as a husband-and-wife matter.”
Surrounded and desperate, Estelle prayed for help. A passer-by intervened, questioning the man and asking him to identify her by name. He gave a name that wasn’t hers. Still, the aggressor refused to let go, insisting she must follow him.
Her lifeline came when another familiar face appeared: the younger brother of her regular yam seller at Akpan Andem market. “As soon as he saw me, he shouted that I was his customer, that he knew my husband and children. That was when the man finally let go and sped off,” she said.
Estelle believes she narrowly escaped a staged kidnap attempt—a scheme where criminals pretend to be lovers or spouses to confuse bystanders.
“I don’t know what would have happened if those men hadn’t shown up,” she admitted, her voice breaking. “People were ready to hand me over to him, even as I screamed for help.”
She now shares her story as a warning to others, especially women, to remain vigilant. “I only stepped out for a simple errand. That could have been the end of me,” she said.
