South Florida
Media Coverage
*~ February, 2008 -- Page 5 ~*
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| In Loving Memory Of |
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Town Center murders - continued
mismanagement (2/19/08)
More chilling details emerge from August Boca mall abduction
(2/19/08)
Boca Raton murder victim's mother speaks out (2/19/08)
Boca mall murders: Victim breaks silence (2/19/08)
Pond drained at site linked to Boca Raton mall killing
(2/21/08)
Investigators drain pond where victim's SUV found (2/21/08)
Deputies search drained pond in West Delray in Gorenberg
murder (2/22/08)
Coral Springs police demand tougher mall security (2/22/08)
Town Center mall victim recounts ordeal: 'I was shaking.
He knew what he was doing' (2/26/08)
Boca mall sued over 'horrible' carjacking of woman, son
(2/26/08)
Town Center murders - continued
mismanagement
Posted by Lori Berman at 12:50 PM
In response to America's Most Wanted airing the murder stories of Nancy
and Joey Bochicchio and Randi Gorenberg on Saturday, February 16th,
the police in Boca Raton and Palm Beach County finally released more
information about the crimes. The fact that new information was divulged
at this late date only serves to highlight the total mismanagement of
these cases by every entity involved.
First, the owners of Town Center, Simon Property Group, Inc. ("Simon") have been in the forefront of the denial movement. Simon has long been aware of problems in their parking lots and kept it hushed up. There are plenty of cameras in the mall to stop shoplifters but crimes against persons evidently were not as much a priority. By instituting "Up Front Parking" and taking over more spaces for valet parking Simon exacerbated the parking lot problems. Simon's initial silence on the murders and then its lame new parking proposals are troubling. The free parking is only until 5 p.m., for mothers with young children and expires Mother's Day. Are we to assume that women without children, including the elderly, women who enter the mall after five or after Mother's Day are not potential targets? Simon should take a serious look at its policies and make some concrete concessions that might even affect its bottom line.
The Boca Police Department's handling of crime frighteningly resembles the Keystone Cops. The police did not believe the woman who was kidnapped in August and even made her take a lie detector test. Then there was no warning to the public about the predator. Even after the Bochicchio's were murdered very little information was released and it was only in response to a national television show that we get more information. It has been almost a year since the Gorenberg murder and two months since the Bochicchio's and the police have no suspects. Shouldn't there be some forensic evidence? The Police Department needs to find the criminals and bring them to justice. Even more important for the future the police need to be proactive and focus on stopping predators and alerting the public to serious crimes.
The Boca Raton Mayor and City Council were also aware that Town Center parking areas are crime ridden. The initial response from the elected officials to the Gorenberg murder was null and the first reaction to the Bochicchio murders was disbelief. It was not until the City Council meeting almost one month later that they excoriated Simon. The Council should stop blaming Simon and do some inward introspection. Why were they unaware of the August kidnapping? Doesn't the police department keep the elected officials aware of town issues? Why did they wait almost a month to issue any public statements? There is a new incumbent Mayor and this is a good time to institute new procedures to assure that our elected officials do not get caught unaware again.
It is deeply troubling that three innocent lives have been lost in our community. Hopefully, Simon, the police and elected officials will learn from mistakes made in handling these cases so that they are more effective in thwarting such crimes and apprehending the perpetrators.
More chilling details emerge from August Boca mall abduction
By Michael LaForgia
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 18, 2008
BOCA RATON - The man in the floppy hat moved through the parking lot and slipped into the woman's sport utility vehicle, all but unnoticed in the heavy heat of the August afternoon.
Settling into the rear passenger seat of the woman's black Lincoln Navigator, the man held a gun to the head of the woman's 2-year-old son and ordered her to drive from the Town Center mall to a nearby ATM.
He forced the woman to withdraw $600, and then the man told her to pull over and switch places with him.
She slid into the seat beside her little boy and held still while the man bound her neck to the headrest with a plastic tie. He secured her wrists with another plastic strip and a lightweight pair of novelty handcuffs, and pulled a third tie tight around her ankles.
He produced a pair of sunglasses, the lenses of which he had covered with blackened duct tape, and put them over her eyes.
These were among chilling new details of an Aug. 7 abduction and robbery at the Town Center mall - an attack that foreshadowed a Dec. 12 double murder at the same shopping center - that emerged last Saturday when the victim appeared on a national television show. The woman's attorney, Walter "Skip" Campbell, confirmed the information Monday.
The woman sat bound in the backseat. The man got behind the wheel of the Lincoln and eventually drove back toward the mall.
On the way, the gunman, a Hispanic man of medium build kept repeating, "Remember, tell the cops I'm a short, fat black guy."
The plastic tie around the woman's neck was too tight. As they made their way back to the mall, she started choking. Looking back at her, the man took out a knife and slid the blade between her throat and the plastic strip. He pulled hard, and slashed off the tie.
Stopped in the parking lot, the man tightened another tie around her neck and, removing the sunglasses, covered her eyes with swimming goggles blackened with felt.
Soon after the man disappeared, the woman struggled free and reported the bizarre attack to Boca Raton police.
Four months passed. Then, early Dec. 13, the bodies of Nancy Bochicchio, 47, and Joey Bochicchio-Hauser, 7, were found sprawled in a bloodstained Chrysler Aspen idling in the parking lot of Town Center mall.
Mother and daughter, who hours earlier had strolled happily though the shopping center, were bound with plastic ties and shot in the head at point-blank range. A pair of broken novelty handcuffs dangled from Nancy Bochicchio's wrists.
A pair of swimming goggles had been pulled over her head.
Suddenly, Boca Raton police wanted to talk again with the earlier victim. On Dec. 13, a sketch artist interviewed her and, based on her months-old recollections, drew a composite rendering of her attacker.
Police called him the prime suspect in the double-murder. In the coming months, police would join with the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office - which was struggling to solve the March 23 murder of Randi Gorenberg, a 52-year-old wife and mother who was shot and dumped in a park west of Delray Beach after shopping at the Town Center mall - to form an investigative task force.
On Saturday, America's Most Wanted aired reenactments Gorenberg's murder, the Aug. 7 robbery and the Dec. 12 killings of the Bochicchios. And although host John Walsh opined that all three crimes were the work of a serial killer, authorities have stopped short of fully endorsing that assessment.
Whoever the killer is, he remains on the loose. His memory haunts the victim of the Aug. 7 attack.
"She was talking to the guy the whole time," said Campbell, the woman's attorney. "She was willing to do whatever it took."
Boca Raton murder victim's mother
speaks out
Last Update: 2/19 10:40 pm
Reported by: Marci Gonzalez
Photographer: Blain Logan
It's the murder that launched what some call the search for a serial killer.
Nearly one year later, Randi Gorenberg's mother speaks only to NewsChannel 5 about whether her death could be linked to other murders in Boca Raton.
Idey Elias tells NewsChannel 5, "I want him found, absolutely, cause if he did it once, twice, he'll do it again."
Idey Elias hesitates to say there may be a serial killer at work, but finds the similarities in Randi's death and the murder of Nancy and Joey Bocchicchio, chilling.
She says she has faith her daughter's killer will be caught, although it will never ease her pain.
Elias explains, "I know I can't get Randi back. I know that. I want her children to be fine. I want that man to turn himself in."
Elias tells us she thinks new details revealed about rings Randi was wearing when she died, and a cd case that went missing from her vehicle are insignificant.
She hopes her emotional story tonight, will help generate new leads.
Anyone with information can call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-458-TIPS.
Boca mall murders: Victim breaks
silence
Posted: Feb 19, 2008 11:10 AM EST
Fox's TV show America's Most Wanted did what it wanted to do. Over the weekend, police got close to a 100 new tips in the Boca Town Center Mall murders.
The one victim that got away broke her silence and told her story. "I just froze because I was in shock. He had a gun to the baby."
We're not telling her name and America's Most Wanted did not show her face, but it's clear: She knows she's lucky. "I didn't know what to do. I just couldn't take the chance of hurting my son."
America's Most Wanted reenacted the abduction at the Boca Town Center Mall from last August.
She says the abductor was calm, but repeated this several times: "Don't forget and tell the cops I am a short, fat, black guy."
He took her and her child to the bank to withdraw $600, but he wasn't done. "I had a nice watch on, I had a diamond bracelet. As soon as he didn't take my jewelry, I thought he was going to kill us."
He put handcuffs on her and quick tied her legs and neck. He first put blacked out sunglasses on her and then goggles with duct tape in them. Before he left her, he told her once again to lie to police about his appearance. "Just in case you don't keep your end of the bargain, I know who you are and where you live."
The survivor is the woman who came up with the new sketch of the Boca Town Center Mall murder suspect. Police believe he's the man connected to the murders of Randi Gorenberg and Nancy and Joey Bochicchio.
On Saturday, America's Most Wanted host John Walsh called this guy a serial killer. The Palm Beach County sheriff would only to go as far as to call him a predator.
Pond drained at site linked to Boca Raton mall killing
By Dianna Cahn |South Florida
Sun-Sentinel
February 21, 2008
Days after a crime television program yielded dozens of new tips in the Town Center mall murder cases, investigators are draining a pond west of Delray Beach where the SUV of one of the victims was found last year.
An industrial water pump continued operating into the evening Wednesday at the pond behind The Home Depot on Atlantic Avenue near Jog Road. Sheriff's "Do Not Cross" barricades and police tape blocked off an access road to the pond, which was less than half full by 9 p.m.
The Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office declined to comment on the draining.
Randi Gorenberg was shot in the head twice at point-blank range on March 23 and her body was dumped from her vehicle alongside Gov. Lawton Chiles Memorial Park on Morikami Park Road off Jog Road. Her abandoned vehicle was discovered about two miles away at the pond the same day. About 40 minutes before Gorenberg was killed, surveillance cameras recorded the 52-year-old West Boca woman leaving Town Center at Boca Raton. Sheriff's Office divers scoured the pond a week later but came up empty-handed. The murder weapon was never recovered.
Investigators think the same man is responsible for killing Nancy Bochicchio, 42, and her 7-year-old daughter, Joey Bochicchio-Hauser, on Dec. 12 after they were attacked in their SUV in the Town Center mall parking lot.
Investigators also attribute an August carjacking of a Town Center shopper and her 2-year-old son to the same man. That woman survived her attack and gave investigators a description of her assailant, which was used to release a sketch of the suspect.
Investigators drain pond where victim's SUV found
By MICHAEL LaFORGIA
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Almost a year after a woman was shot and killed in a park west of Delray Beach, investigators on Wednesday were draining a pond behind the shopping center where the killer abandoned the victim's bloodstained sport utility vehicle.
At 1:15 p.m. on March 23, a security camera at the Town Center mall captured Randi Gorenberg, a 52-year-old wife and mother, striding toward the parking lot after a shopping trip. Thirty-nine minutes later, Gorenberg was shot in the head and pushed from her SUV behind the South County Civic Center near Jog and Morikami Park roads. An hour after the shooting, the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office found Gorenberg's black 2007 Mercedes GL450 parked behind the Home Depot in a shopping center at Jog Road and West Atlantic Avenue, less than 2 miles from the crime scene.
A week later, the sheriff's dive team scoured a pond behind the shopping center but found nothing to aid in the investigation, which so far has frustrated detectives and the family of the suburban Boca Raton woman. Investigators have yet to find several items Gorenberg carried on the day she was killed, including a beige Kooba purse, wallet, cellphone, shopping bags and shoes - black-and-white Puma sneakers.
Authorities had hoped to turn up the murder weapon or some other evidence during the March 29 search, which pitted divers against several hundred square feet of muddy water.
On Wednesday, a representative of Johnson-Davis Inc., a Lantana-based contractor, confirmed that the sheriff's office had hired the company to drain the pond. A sheriff's spokesman wouldn't comment.
Behind a set of barricades, a heavy-duty generator hummed on the pond's bank and a thick, pulsing red hose snaked from the water to a manhole late Wednesday afternoon. The pond stood about three-quarters empty.
The effort comes less than a month after sheriff's investigators teamed with Boca Raton detectives, who were trying to solve their own murder mystery with ties to the Town Center mall, to form a joint task force.
On Dec. 13, Nancy Bochicchio, 47, and her daughter, Joey Bochicchio-Hauser, 7, of suburban Boca Raton were found bound and shot to death in a black 2007 Chrysler Aspen idling in the mall parking lot. A security camera captured the Bochicchios leaving the mall through the same exit Gorenberg used nine months earlier.
Police said a gunman ambushed
the pair, forced Nancy Bochicchio to withdraw $500 from an ATM and then
bound her ankles, wrists and neck with plastic ties. The attacker pulled
a pair of swimming goggles over Nancy Bochicchio's eyes and then shot
mother and daughter in the head at point-blank range.
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Deputies search drained pond in West Delray in Gorenberg murder
By Leon Fooksman |South Florida
Sun-Sentinel
February 22, 2008
WEST DELRAY - Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office divers slogged through the muck of a drained pond behind a shopping center Thursday looking for clues in the killing of a 52-year-old woman 11 months ago.
They raked and shoveled the mud along the banks next to Home Depot on West Atlantic Avenue west of Delray Beach, where Randi Gorenberg's SUV was found March 23. They ran metal detectors over the wet surface, searching there once again for her belongings and for the gun used to kill the mother.
What they found this time, if anything, wasn't revealed.
Sheriff's spokeswoman Teri Barbera would only say: "The draining is for investigative purposes."
The pond was drained this week following Saturday's showing of the TV program America's Most Wanted.
The nationally televised show profiled Gorenberg's killing along with the slayings of a mother and daughter found at the Town Center mall in Boca Raton on Dec. 12 and the abduction and robbery of a 30-year-old mother and her son at the same mall on Aug. 7. All three crimes are being investigated together to determine if a serial killer and robber is responsible.
The show generated dozens of new leads for investigators, but they have not said if any one tip led them back to the pond.
Gorenberg was shot in the head and dumped from her vehicle next to Gov. Lawton Chiles Memorial Park on Morikami Park Road off Jog Road. Her abandoned vehicle was discovered the same day next to the pond, about two miles away.
Sheriff's Office divers scoured the pond a week later but came up empty-handed. The murder weapon was never recovered. Gorenberg's shoes, purse and cell phone never were found.
The Sheriff's Office is asking anyone with information on the case to call Crime Stoppers, 800-458-8477.
Leon Fooksman can be reached at lfooksman@sun-sentinel.com or 561-243-6647.
Coral Springs police demand tougher mall security
By Lisa J. Huriash |South Florida
Sun-Sentinel
February 22, 2008
CORAL SPRINGS - Since someone murdered a mother and daughter and left their bodies outside a Boca Raton mall, Coral Springs Police Chief Duncan Foster repeatedly tried to talk to the owners of Coral Square Mall about hiring off-duty officers to increase security.
But Foster said his requests went unanswered by mall managers for Simon Property Group, owner also of the Town Center at Boca Raton, where the bodies were found. Now Foster has written the owner of the malls, asking for a sit-down meeting.
"No one has contacted our department to discuss any security arrangements at the Coral Square Mall with regards to the recent tragedy at the Town Center or to discuss any potential partnership to alleviate future security concerns," Foster wrote in the letter mailed Thursday to John Petruzzi, vice president of corporate security for Indianapolis-based Simon.
Petruzzi, reached by telephone, said he would respond quickly to the chief's concerns. He said a new mall manager, who starts Monday, "will reach out to the police."
"We take these things very seriously," Petruzzi said. "Let's face facts: Florida is an increasingly violent area."
About midnight on Dec. 13, the bodies of Nancy Bochicchio, 47, and her daughter Joey, 7, were discovered in an idling SUV outside Sears at Town Center. After a surveillance camera recorded them leaving the mall the day before, someone abducted and shot them to death.
And just nine months earlier, Randi Gorenberg, 52, was killed and left at Gov. Lawton Chiles Memorial Park west of Delray Beach. About 40 minutes before that, surveillance cameras had shown her leaving the Town Center mall. Both crimes are unsolved.
Simon is spending just under $1 million at the Town Center on security technology including cameras that can focus in on license plates and faces. Other area malls use motorized scooters, patrol cars, police cruisers and plainclothes security.
The vast majority of crimes reported at the Coral Square Mall are shoplifting and other theft cases, according to Coral Springs police records. Police responded to more than 2,000 such cases from 2003 until Dec. 20, 2007, the records show. During that time police also reported four rapes, 17 aggravated assaults and 17 robberies.
Foster wrote in the letter that in the last three years, his department has dedicated one police officer to the mall at the city's expense. In November, with the holidays approaching, Foster asked the interim mall manager to discuss security concerns, and was told the mall would hire additional off-duty police officers. "That never happened," he wrote.
"We have a duty to the residents and visitors to provide police protection in the mall," Foster said Thursday. "We assigned a full-time officer every day, but I don't think it's unreasonable to ask the mall to enhance their police presence by paying for off-duty police officers during the holiday season."
Since January, the chief wrote, "we have attempted to schedule three separate meetings with the mall management. We have not yet been able to sit down with anyone from Simon Properties to discuss this."
City Commissioner Roy Gold said he hopes the matter will be resolved soon.
"When we're not having good dialogues, good communication with this business partner, it's important to me we ask for it again and again," he said. "Thirteen miles away we have the [Town Center] mall and that is a bad situation. We want to make sure we're doing everything we can to ensure the safety of our residents and visitors."
Staff Writer Brian Haas contributed to this report. Lisa J. Huriash can be reached at lhuriash@sun-sentinel.com or 954-572-2008.
Town Center mall victim recounts ordeal: 'I was shaking. He knew what he was doing'
By KEVIN DEUTSCH and MICHAEL LaFORGIA
Palm Beach Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Before he bound, shot and slid goggles over the face of a mother and her 7-year old daughter outside Town Center mall, authorities suspect a ritualistic killer first tried out his methods on an earlier set of victims.
On Tuesday that earlier victim, a 31-year-old mother, recounted her ordeal to The Palm Beach Post in her first newspaper interview since the Aug. 7 attack.
"I was shaking," she said. "He knew what he was doing."
The woman said the man, pictured wearing a floppy brown hat and sunglasses in a forensic composite sketch that has since become ubiquitious in South Florida, drove the woman and her 2-year-old son between suburban Boca Raton and Delray Beach for an hour and a half. During the encounter, the man forced the woman to an ATM at a bank a half-mile from the shopping center. Then he drove mother and son up and down the turnpike and returning them to the mall, bound and blindfolded in the back of the woman's black 2007 Lincoln Navigator.
In the mall parking lot, the woman said, the man slowed the car as if to stop next to an idling silver 2007 Chevrolet Suburban and make eye contact with the other driver, a white man whose features she couldn't make out. She had noticed the same Suburban in the parking spot beside her when she had entered the mall through the Nordstrom's parking garage some two hours earlier, she said.
Soon after, as the attacker slid white goggles with blacked out lenses over her eyes on a hot August afternoon, the woman thought she and her 2-year-old son would be shot dead; the same fate Nancy Bochicchio and her daughter, Joey Bochicchio-Hauser, would meet at the hands of the gunman four months later.
The Aug. 7 kidnapping began when the gunman moved through the parking lot and slipped into the woman's sport utility vehicle as she loaded her son's stroller in the trunk.
Settling into the rear passenger seat of the woman's black Lincoln Navigator, the man held a gun to the head of the woman's son and ordered her to drive from the Nordstrom parking garage at Town Center to a nearby ATM.
The boy called for his mother. The woman stared at her gunman, in shock.
"Take whatever you want, just don't hurt us," she told him.
The woman drove to a Wachovia branch near the mall, but saw no ATM there.
The gunman told her to pull into the drive-thru . At a drive-thru ATM, she followed his orders and made three $200 withdrawls before a fourth transaction failed, she said.
The man later told her to pull over into the a parking lot and switch places with him.
She told him he could leave and she wouldn't call anyone.
"I can't risk that," he told her.
She slid into the seat beside her little boy and held still while the man bound her neck to the headrest with a plastic tie. He placed his gun in his holster, secured her wrists with another plastic strip and a lightweight pair of novelty handcuffs, and pulled a third tie tight around her ankles.
He produced a pair of sunglasses, the lenses of which he had covered with blackened duct tape, and put them over her eyes.
The woman sat bound in the back seat. The man got behind the wheel of the Lincoln and eventually drove back toward the mall.
On the way, the gunman, a Hispanic man of medium build, kept repeating, "Remember, tell the cops I'm a short, fat black guy."
The plastic tie around the woman's neck was too tight. As they made their way back to the mall, she started choking. The man took out a knife and slid the blade between her throat and the strip. He pulled and slashed off the tie.
Stopped in the parking lot, the man tightened another tie around her neck and, removing the sunglasses, covered her eyes with swimming goggles blackened with felt.
At one point, the woman was hyperventalating. She said the man gave her her purse so she could use a inhaler. He also asked if she wanted a drink from her Dunkin' Donuts iced coffee.
During the encounter, the attacker drove through two toll booths on Florida's Turnpike, the victim said.
Soon after the man disappeared, the woman struggled free and reported the bizarre attack to Boca Raton police.
Four months passed. Then, early Dec. 13, the bodies of Bochicchio, 47, and her daughter, 7, were found sprawled in a bloodstained Chrysler Aspen idling in the parking lot of the Town Center mall.
The mother and daughter, who hours earlier had strolled happilythough the shopping center, were bound with plastic ties and shot in the head at point-blank range. A pair of broken novelty handcuffs dangled from Nancy Bochicchio's wrists. A pair of swimming goggles had been pulled over her head.
Police called the Aug. 7 attacker the prime suspect in the double murder. In the coming months, police would join with the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office — which was struggling to solve the March 23 murder of Randi Gorenberg, a 52-year-old wife and mother who was shot and dumped in a park west of Delray Beach after shopping at the Town Center mall — to form an investigative task force.
Authorities say it's possible
that a serial killer murdered Gorenberg, Bochicchio and her daughter.
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Boca mall sued over 'horrible' carjacking of woman, son
By Patty Pensa | South Florida
Sun-Sentinel
February 27, 2008
She considered crashing her SUV or mouthing something to the ATM camera at the bank - anything to save her son and herself from the man who, with gun in hand, could have killed them.
For 1 ½ hours on Aug. 7, the mother and son were taken on a frightening ride from the Town Center at Boca Raton, the focal point of three murders in the past year. The mother, still struggling with fear, revealed on Tuesday new details about the ordeal she and her son suffered.
In an interview provided to WPTV-Ch. 5, the woman recounted being carjacked from the mall after she put her 2-year-old son in her black Lincoln Navigator and then stowed her shopping bags and his stroller in the trunk. A 2007 silver Chevrolet Suburban was parked next to her in the lot outside Nordstrom as she prepared to leave. That same SUV was in a remote area near Sears where the perpetrator first stopped upon their return to the mall.
"I kept thinking, what was I going to do? What could I do?" the mother said of first meeting the perpetrator. "There was nothing I could do. He had a gun to my son."
The woman, who has requested anonymity for fear of her life, said she thinks the same man murdered Randi Gorenberg, who was seen leaving the mall on surveillance camera the day she was killed in March. Nancy Bochicchio and her 7-year-old daughter, Joey, were killed in December also after leaving the mall and being forced to drive to an ATM, one of several similarities to the unidentified mother.
The woman has filed a lawsuit in Broward County Circuit Court against mall owner Simon Property Group for failing to provide security. Bochicchio's sister last month filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against Simon. The Indianapolis-based company declined to comment Tuesday.
"I used to be able to go out without any worries or having to look over my shoulder," the mother said. "I used to lead a normal life. It all changed when my son and I were kidnapped."
Plagued by nightmares, the woman said she did everything she could to prevent the man from attacking again. She provided police with every detail of what happened and helped a forensic artist sketch the attacker. With that information, her crime wasn't publicized until Bochicchio and her daughter were killed.
"My heart just sank when I heard this happened again - that it happened again and he actually killed a mom and her child," she said.
Like Bochicchio, the unidentified mother was bound with zip ties and her eyes were covered with blackened goggles. Some, including John Walsh of America's Most Wanted, have labeled the man a serial killer.
The woman's attorney, Skip Campbell, did not say how much money she is seeking through the lawsuit. He has not received a response from Simon.
"We feel very strongly that the mall has been especially negligent when it comes to security for people who come and shop," he said.
Since the Bochicchio murders, Simon has formed a crime prevention task force, offered free valet parking to parents with children and plastered several malls with sketches of the perpetrator. Officials have said additional surveillance cameras and a police substation were planned before the murders.
The woman carjacked in August said she never expected anything would happen at the mall, especially during the day. She has not returned there since the attack.
In the television interview, she recalled driving to two banks, the second a Bank of America, where she took out $600 in $200 increments. She described her attacker as calm and obviously thinking about where he wanted her to drive.
Though he forced her to flip the rear view mirror up, the man allowed her to turn around to reassure her son and pat his leg. During those quick glances back, the woman memorized his features and attire.
"It's not hard to forget a face when someone does something so horrible to you and your son," she said.
After the bank, they wound up in the parking lot outside Pete's Restaurant west of Boca Raton. There she pleaded with her attacker before he snapped handcuffs on her, zip-tied her ankles and neck, and covered her eyes with blacked-out sunglasses. He then drove on the turnpike, stopped at a shopping center west of Delray Beach and came back to the mall by 6:15 p.m.
He ultimately left her back by Nordstrom, away from the silver Suburban the mother saw before and after the carjacking.
"I want this guy to get caught before he hurts anyone else," she said. "Who's to say he's not going to do it again?"
Patty Pensa can be reached at ppensa@sun-sentinel.com or 561-243-6609.