A brazen attempt to steal a car in Shenzhen has resulted in the fantastic spectacle of two people hanging on for dear life to a speeding car making its getaway, dragging them behind it, reports the Nandu. But as with all such terrible transgressions, we should try to remember the real victims of the crime.

On the evening of April 19, Mr Pan was out celebrating with his family at a restaurant located on Minfeng Road in the Longhua District of Shenzhen. As Pan left the driver’s seat to grab his bag from the trunk of the car, his wife Li exited the front passenger seat to walk around to the driver’s side.

Before Li could get in, a man suddenly jumped into the driver’s seat and started to drive away. Especially alarmed as the car was still occupied by their two and-a-half year old child and its grandmother sitting in the back seat, the parents were determined not to allow their single-most treasured commodity to be kidnapped. Said Li afterwards, “If it wasn’t for the child, we wouldn’t have risked everything [to get him back].“

And so with the steely grip that only a tiger mother can possess, Li held on to the car with fierce claws of tenacity; Li gripped onto the steering wheel from outside the car window. Meanwhile, her husband Pan tried to hang onto the car from the rear passenger window.

Only after dragging the parents 100 meters did the carjacker finally succeed in shaking off the parents by driving into a guardrail. However, in his attempt to escape, the carjacker rear-ended a car waiting for a red light. Picking themselves up and hurrying over to the collision, the parents wrenched open the car door, hauled out the carjacker, and were given most brazen reply to a carjacking you can imagine:

“The two of you are trying to steal my car.”

The parents were able to recover their most prized possession and were reunited with the grandmother, but were injured in the process. Pan’s suffered many scratches to his knees and right arm, and Li suffered a concussion to her head.

This sounds like a nightmare for Pan’s family, especially considering it occurred on Pan’s own birthday. However, we should try to sympathize with the real victim here—the carjacker himself, 30 year-old Zheng from Yongzhou, Hunan Province.

On the night of the incident, Zheng had just left his friend’s house and was feeling suicidal after drinking two bottles of beer. It was at that time when Zheng made the decision to steal the victims’ car.

As they await the results of a blood alcohol test stemming from the consumed two bottles of beer, police gave a statement to Nandu that seems to treat Zheng as a victim of circumstance:

Investigating police explained that Zheng simply did not know that there was a child and elderly person sitting in the back seat when he got in, and that he doesn’t have a driver’s license nor knows how to drive.

Oh, so that’s why I’m not feeling outrage at this heinous crime. Zheng happened to have lost his job and his wife last year, and is a sad circumstance that surely must be a gateway to commit felonies after having imbibed a pair of China’s piss-poor beers.

While we sympathize with Zheng’s sad plight, it seems the crime of carjacking a vehicle with a baby in the backseat isn’t taken that seriously even though a similar case last year resulted in the death of a kidnapped baby.

Photo: Nandu