A Texas carjacker is dead after he brutally beat up a grandmother and stole her car, only to fatally crash the vehicle a short time later.
Shirlene Hernandez, 72, was on her way to work April 12 and stopped at a Shell gas station in San Antonio to buy a Diet Coke, reports Local 12 News.
As she was walking inside, a man grabbed her and punched her several times in the face in a tussle to take her keys away.
Three men attempted to stop the assailant, but he managed to escape their grasp and flee in Hernandez’s car.
The suspect didn’t get far, however. Investigators told local media that the car was found a short time later, totalled on a nearby interstate. The carjacker was dead inside the vehicle.
Hernandez, although a bit roughed up, says she doesn’t hold bad feelings toward her attacker and was sad to learn he had been killed in the crash.
“There’s a lot of people who would say what goes around comes around, karma. I did not think that; the only thing I got (was) really sad because he had died,” Hernandez told WCAX3.
“Now granted, he had hurt me, but the Lord saw fit to take him out of his misery.”
Hernandez’s granddaughter, Helen Garcia, started a GoFundMe to help raise money to replace her grandmother’s car so she can get to work every day.
Hernandez told Local 12 News a car is essential for her, as the income helps keep her and her husband afloat.
“I just don’t want to quit working, and so I’ve got to somehow get another car, and that takes money and stuff,” she told the news station. “I’ve got to figure out what to do.”
“I just hope that if this situation happens to anybody else, that somebody will step forward, leap forward, run forward, whatever, and help the person that it’s happening to,” she said.
As of Tuesday morning, the fundraiser had surpassed its original goal of US$5,000, raising almost $25,000 for Hernandez.
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