A UK mother deserves a serious slow clap for her recent act of bravery. Amy-Leigh Hill, 24, reportedly fended off not one, not two, but three armed robbers who were trying to steal her car last month. According to Yahoo! News, she's now speaking out about the traumatizing event in hopes that someone out there has information that might bring the masked carjackers to justice.
Hill was reportedly at home in Birmingham, England, when the carjackers tried to make off with her Audi SQ5.
There was just one problem: Her 3-year-old son, Ronny, was in the back seat. And this mama bear was NOT about to let them take off with the toddler.
One of the men, who reportedly had a crowbar in his hand, tried to demand that Hill give him the keys to the pricey SUV — but Hill was not budging.
One of the men even jumped into the car at one point, causing her to shout, 'My son's in the car -- leave him alone!'"
She told SWNS that she even put her handbag under a potted plant and sat on it, in a desperate attempt to put anything she could between her keys and the carjackers' grubby hands. Even as they pushed her up against the window to her house and had her by the throat, she says she kicked them away and screamed at them to get off.
Remarkably, her efforts worked. Hill managed to keep all three of the men from grabbing the keys from her.
Finally, she and her friend were able to call the police, just as the men fled in an approaching getaway car.
CCTV footage that captured the incident has been released to the public, and it shows Hill fighting back as the robbers wrestled her for the keys.
“Then they started attacking me from all sorts of angles," she later told Yahoo! News. "I was pushing them off."
She also did her best to plead with them to have compassion.
“I was saying ‘My child is is in the car’ but they weren’t paying attention," she recalled. "I did everything in my power to do stop them. I acted on instinct."
She said her friend, who was with her at the time, begged her to just give them the keys. But with her child in the car? No way, she told her.
"They had a crowbar but weren't hitting me with it, so I thought, well if they were going to hit me they'd have done it by now and carried on fighting back," she shared.
Pretty traumatizing, right? And yet, it also marks the third time Hill's car was nearly stolen since she bought it.
"We have had the car for 12 months, and three months after it was stolen from our house," she told Yahoo! News. "The car was kept by the police for six months, then three months after we got it back someone tried to take it again."
Needless to say, she's both shocked and traumatized, and said she's desperate to sell her car and move.
She's also angry at the carjackers, who she called "juveniles who need to go and get a job."
“I think the carjackers needed smacked bottoms," she added. "It’s ridiculous they will try to steal things from other people who have got their qualifications and spent years and years working for it."
Hill is also heartbroken for her little boy, who is scarred by the incident.
“I’m devastated my little boy has been traumati[z]ed," she shared. "He is always asking where 'the baddies' are, and talking about the police. He was crying his eyes out when he got out [of] the car. What are we supposed to tell him? It’s just so scary."
For now, the mother says she's been trying to comfort and reassure her son any way she can, and often tells him that "the baddies" have been caught.
"I just say they aren't coming back, because they're in a cage," she said. It might be a lie, but Hill hopes that soon, it won't be. "That's where they really need they be."
