Thief to victim: 'Sorry Miss'

STILL SMILING: Shona Hobson and her 2-year-old granddaughter Kaelyn Clark-Hobson.

Whatever else was said while a man busied himself stealing her car on Monday morning, Kaitaia woman Shona Hobson vividly recalls two words.

"Sorry, Miss," the thief said to her moments before she toppled out of the car and he drove off, running over her legs as he did so.

Ms Hobson is now at home, recovering from severe bruising, but showing no sign of being cowed by her experience.

She was not one to be intimidated, she said. She loved her home and her community and felt safe in both. No thief was going to take that from her.

She would be visiting the man who took her car, too.

"He'll be sober then," she said, "and I will tell him that I did not appreciate him coming into my home."

The drama began shortly after Ms Hobson began her daily routine at around 6.15am.

Her brother, Shane Clark, told her that someone was in her car, immediately outside the back door at her Matthews' Avenue house. She assumed it was a family member, and when she realised it wasn't she leapt into the passenger's seat.

The thief, who had actually entered her house to get the keys, had the car started by that time. And he was not going to be deterred, even with Ms Hobson kneeling on the passenger's seat, pulling the handbrake on and knocking the car out of gear, and Mr Clark trying to pull him out via the driver's window.

Ms Hobson said she was still kneeling on the seat when the thief offered his apology moments before he pushed her out and on to the road. As he drove off the left rear wheel ran over her legs.

A driver who stopped on the other side of the road was about to bring her a jacket to cover her as she lay there, face down in the street, while another motorist stopped traffic, but a log truck driver was clearly in a hurry to get through.

He stopped, his front right wheel within less than an arm's length of her face, and asked Mr Clark to move her arm so he could get past.

"He would have run over my arm if Shane hadn't lifted it up," Ms Hobson said.

"I think I said something you wouldn't want to print. You just don't do that, do you?"

She knew the driver, she added, and would be speaking to him.

Ms Hobson, who works at the Kaitaia police station in the civilian role of Strengthening Families Co-ordinator (under the Families and Community Service, part of the Ministry of Social Development), and who was awarded the Queen's Service Medal in 2010 for services to the police and community, said she had long worked with people who were "challenged in a variety of areas", and had seen more than most people, so her experience on Monday morning would not change the way she lived her life.

She had nothing but praise for the police and Kaitaia Hospital staff, however.

"Everyone has been brilliant," she said, but she did not recommend that anyone else follow her example.

"Take my advice. It's only a car, so let the thief have it," she said.