Australian Grandma celebrating her birthday tackles purse snatcher in bar parking lot
An Australian grandma celebrating her birthday at a local pub chased down, tackled, then wrestled a purse-snatching thief in a video ABC News obtained.
The unidentified tough ol’ lady, identified as a “grandmother” by ABC, reportedly chased after a male suspect who was wearing shorts and flip-flops after the man grabbed her purse and ran off with it in the northeastern state of Queensland in January.
After catching up with the would-be purse snatcher, the woman tackles him down in a parking lot, places the man in a headlock, then tears off his shirt while holding onto the purse, which she successfully recovered. The feisty grandmother even managed to grab one of the would-be thief’s flip-flops and threw it at him as he fled the scene.
The man managed to get away in a truck but was later arrested and charged with robbery. The lady whose purse was nabbed didn’t get off scot-free either. She is alleged to have suffered cracked ribs and abrasions during the scuffle.
According to the woman’s family, she is a grandmother to at least 10 grandchildren, which only added to the public admiration for how fearlessly she stood her ground against a much younger attacker.
The Daily Telegraph later identified the man charged over the robbery as Troy Charles Bennett, who was 42 at the time. When Bennett appeared in court that following Wednesday, he reportedly hid in the courthouse toilets for more than an hour before emerging in a face mask and sunglasses in an apparent attempt to avoid waiting cameras. He was said to have tried to shield himself behind two prosecutors as they left the building, before bolting across the road into a nearby car park — an exit that, fittingly, echoed the parking-lot chase that made him infamous in the first place.
The footage spread rapidly across Australian and international outlets after Queensland Police released it, with viewers widely praising the birthday celebrant for refusing to let the thief walk away with her belongings. While self-defense experts generally caution the public against physically pursuing a fleeing thief over property — noting that recovered handbags are rarely worth the risk of serious injury — the grandmother’s determination turned an attempted robbery into one of the most-shared crime clips of the year.
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