What sort of person stands on top of a bridge across a major road and casually hurls a brick with precision through the windscreen of a car passing underneath?
Essex Police don't know, but they are so anxious to meet this individual that they are stepping up patrols in the area. Hopefully it is only one person.
Although an A road is not a motorway, parts of the A12 are so classified. It is extremely busy, and at 10 o'clock on a December night, it is also dark, which is when a 57 year old woman was hit by a brick the size of a bucket. She had to be cut out of the car; her husband escaped serious injury, but it goes without saying that things could have been a lot worse. The police are treating
last Thursday's incident as attempted murder.
A similar attack about 40 minutes earlier saw a woman and her 26 year old daughter escape serious injury when a rock crashed through their windscreen eight miles up the road. The rock from this attack is pictured above.
The two, mother of two, driver Lisa Horne and
her mother Stella Horne, appeared at a press conference today where they gave harrowing testimony.
There was a similar, and presumably unrelated attack in a different part of the country
earlier this year, but there have unfortunately been a number of incidents in this part of Essex of late, which if nothing else shows a pattern.
In November 1984, a taxi driver was killed in South Wales when
his vehicle was hit by a concrete block thrown by two men during the acrimonious miners' strike.
The following May they were given life sentences for murder. Hopefully, the person or persons responsible for these attacks will be apprehended before someone is actually killed.