As he recovers from the surgery he underwent on Friday to reconstruct the broken bones in his left leg, Brazilian delivery rider Alexandre Athos Pinheiro Teixeira (23) is still in shock after being chased then rammed as he worked in Cork on Halloween night.
Shortly before midnight Mr Teixeira, who also studies English in Ireland, had just completed a delivery on his motorbike in the Blackrock area of the city when he noticed a grey car stopping and reversing in his direction.
“I thought someone had gone the wrong way or something, that’s normal. I swerved to avoid the car,” he says.
Moments later, when he tried to overtake it, however, he was suddenly attacked by a man “wearing a mask and a bandanna. The car’s back door opened, and a person jumped out of the car towards me.
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“I thought: ‘Wow, I’m going to get robbed,’ or something like that, but I still didn’t know if it was a Halloween prank. And I sped up. Then the person tried to pull me but he couldn’t. I sped up and left.
“I thought they were going to leave me alone at that point, but they didn’t. My motorbike isn’t very fast and their car was much faster. So, when they caught up to me, I braked and turned back to try to lose them.”
To try to escape, Mr Teixeira entered a residential area but he was caught as he tried to make a sudden turn.
“They knocked me off the motorcycle with the car, but at that moment I hadn’t been hurt yet. I was fine,” he says.
The same attacker who had earlier jumped out of the car emerged from the vehicle again. “I started screaming: ‘Why are you doing this to me? Why are you doing this to me?’”
The man started swinging punches in the direction of Mr Teixeira, who sought to hit him back. “I managed to punch him and he got back in the car,” he says.
He was then caught off guard for a moment and the driver accelerated towards him. “This part is a kind of a blur in my mind, but I remember my leg cracking. I think it got between the fender (mudguard) of my motorcycle and the bumper of the car,” Mr Teixeira said.
The occupants of the car left the scene, abandoning their victim who was lying trapped by his motorbike with severe compound fractures in his left leg.
“If I had landed on my hip,” he says, “I could have been in a wheelchair. If I had landed on my head near the car, I could have been dead. They would have killed me.”
Mr Teixeira told The Irish Times he managed to call an emergency group of delivery workers and send them his location. “They came to where I was and helped me,” he says. Residents also heard the collision and discovered the victim in severe pain on the street and called emergency assistance.
He was brought to Cork University Hospital, where he underwent surgery. “I think it’ll be a few months of recovery,” he says.
Mr Teixeira says he saw a man driving the car, a woman front passenger, and another man in the back. All were in their 20s, he believes.
Gardaí recovered a stolen Skoda Kodiaq – believed to have been used to ram Mr Teixeira – burnt out in a field in Carrignavar, 12km north of Cork city, early on Friday morning and have begun a technical examination of the vehicle.
The same car is believed to have rammed a Garda vehicle at about 2am on the Old Mallow Road on the northside of the city, about 8km from the scene of the hit and run. Two gardaí were treated for minor injuries at the scene.
Gardaí suspect that the occupant or occupants of the stolen Skoda Kodiaq were collected by a driver in another car.
Gardaí have requested witnesses or anyone with footage of either incident to contact them at Anglesea Street station at 021 452 000 or the Confidential Line at 1800 666 111.
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