Porirua woman searches for man who allegedly threatened her in road rage incident

A Porirua woman is shaken after an alleged road rage incident where she claimed a man threw rubbish at her car before running at her vehicle and screaming about fighting her. At 6.50am, Ashley Stead was running late to work when she said a man went “hoofing” through a busy intersection and cut her car off. While Stead drove behind the blue car, caught on dash camera footage, the male driver began throwing rubbish out of the window at her car, including a plastic bottle, she claimed. Stead increased her distance from the car on Postgate Dr in Whitby, trying to avoid more trouble. Porirua local Ashley Stead caught the incident on her dash camera. The blue car suddenly turned left, despite indicating right. “I’m just like, ‘I want to get away from this.’ So, I went to go around him. And then he like threw his car into the middle of the road. “I slammed on my brakes and there was probably a good, like, 4 metres between us because I, like, wanted to create space.” The man jumped out of his car, and put on sunglasses, despite it being dark and raining outside. “He put his sunglasses on and then started yelling and came running towards the car, screaming and yelling,” she said. The man was yelling something through the car window about fighting Stead, she claimed. The unknown man was speeding down Postgate Dr in Porirua, the woman claimed. “I had just chucked it in reverse and just started reversing down the road, like, freaking out,” Stead said. At that point he got back into his car and left. Stead pulled over and called the police to make a report. The man was wearing a long-sleeve blue top, and what appeared to be workmen’s pants. Stead, a mental health social worker, didn’t want to make assumptions about the man, saying he might have just been having a bad day. “But I do feel that he needs to be held accountable in some sense. Like what if it was an old woman that experienced that or an old person, you know, someone more vulnerable than me? The car is a dark blue, she said. “I also want them to be able to get that health and support that they need because obviously something’s going on for them, because that’s not a normal response.” Stead shared news of the incident to Facebook to look for more information, resulting in the person that had been in a vehicle behind her contacting her to try help identify the car type. Other commenters called the incident “terrifying”. Police said they were aware of the “traffic-related incident”. Police referred Stead to 105 to file an online report, as she had made her way to a safe area. Sammy Carter is a journalist for the New Zealand Herald covering news in the Wellington region. She has previously worked at the Rotorua Daily Post.

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