PHOENIX — A Phoenix woman is feeling lucky to be alive after someone cut the brake lines on her car.
She narrowly avoided hitting a brick wall when she got behind the wheel.
"I was backing up and I went to ease on my brakes to put it into drive and when I went to hit my brake literally nothing happened," Rachel Leinson said. "It really scared me, luckily I immediately pulled the emergency brake and that stopped the car completely."
It happened at her complex near the corner of 28th Street and Indian School Road in Phoenix.
"I thought maybe I didn't turn my car on correctly, I have no idea I'm not a car person."
She didn't initially think the worst, so she called a tow truck driver.
"The tow truck guy looks under the car and comes back and was like 'did you just dump someone?' I was like what? And he goes 'do you have any enemies?' And I was like no, not that I can think of, why? And he said 'someone wanted you dead today.'"
Then she called the police.
"I was so scared, {the tow truck driver} wasn’t trying to freak me out he was just like 'this is crazy, I’ve never seen anything like this, this is like a threat.'"
After talking with officers and her neighbors through Nextdoor she learned she’s not alone and wants others to be on alert.
"Luckily and not luckily, other people have responded that this has happened to them within two miles of where I live so I wasn’t feeling personally targeted but still it's really scary. One person said her neighbor hit a tree."
Jeff Moskowitz is another victim of this brake cutting crime and he caught it on camera. He also posted to Nextdoor. He said the surveillance video was taken last Thursday around 1:30 a.m.
In the video, taken about ten minutes from where Leinson lives on the corner of N 10th Street and Glendale Avenue, you can see someone on crutches heading toward a car.
The person then spends a couple of minutes cutting brake lines. The images are hard to make out because it was taken in the middle of the night.
The victims 12 News spoke with say a handful of people were targeted.
"I don’t have road rage, I don’t interact with people or drive very much, so it was just very odd," Leinson added.
A spokesperson for the Phoenix Police Department said this doesn’t seem to be a trend and the investigation is ongoing.
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