Nine-year-old Braydon De Repentigny said he was walking home from Kelowna’s Spring Valley Elementary on Thursday when a white minivan stopped at the entrance to a parking lot, blocking his path along the sidewalk.
“The lady rolled down her window and asked if I wanted a ride and I said ‘no’,” the Grade 4 student said. “And she said, ‘Are you sure?’ I said ‘no’ again.”
“I just kept repeating ‘stranger danger’ in my head.”
Braydon said the woman then offered him a toy.
“I said ‘no,’ and then I started walking around, and I was very nervous she might circle around and follow me,” he said.
The driver didn’t follow Braydon. He rushed home to his mother.
“Initally I was a little bit skeptical because you hear these things happen, and you prepare your child as best you can for a situation like this, but you don’t ever think it’s going to happen to your kid,”
Darcie Mulholland, Braydon’s mother, said.
“Then just kind of really looking at him, I knew he wasn’t lying. I could see it in his face that he was really shaken up about it, and he looked scared.”
Mulholland notified RCMP. She also posted to Facebook, and a woman messaged her to say she saw the two talking as she was leaving Costco.
“That’s when it hit me really, really, hard that this happened, and I could have lost my son,” Mulholland said.
“I was really grateful that we’ve always been really open and honest with him about these are the things that can happen.”
Braydon said he didn’t see the toy or anybody else in the car.
The woman has dark, shoulder-length hair and drives a white minivan, he added.
Police are asking the driver to contact them to hopefully shed some light on the incident.
RCMP are also reminding parents to discuss personal awareness and safety strategies with their children.
They recommend having a secret word for your family that can be used in emergencies to identify a safe person.
Police also suggest children and teens should walk to places with a buddy.
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