This drawing shows the armed robbery a seven-year-old boy witnessed when two criminals tried to rob his mum on their way to school and threatened to kill her when she froze in fear.
The incident took place in the North Zone of Rio de Janeiro in southeast Brazil while Tatiana Carvalho, 40, was walking her son to school on 13th August.
After escaping from the armed robbers, the mother took her seven-year-old son home and gave him pens and paper to draw to help calm him down.
A short while later, the boy’s mother and gran realised he had illustrated the attempted robbery as well as a scene of Heaven, explaining that is where his mother would have gone had she been shot in the earlier incident.
The sketch of the robbery shows two masked men pointing a gun at the boy and his mum as one of them says “kill her”.
Carvalho told local media about the scary incident: “We were suddenly stopped by two men on a motorbike wearing helmets, they said something and I didn’t understand so I took a couple of steps forward until they started shouting that it was a robbery. I lost it, I panicked.”
With her son by her side, the mother said she froze on the spot and the two men grew angry at how long it was taking her to hand over her bag.
One of them pointed a gun at the mother and his accomplice told him “kill her”.
Carvalho explained: “As it took me a while to realise what was going on, I think I took a long time to give them my bag because in that nervous moment when I went to hand it to them, the one in front started yelling at the other ‘kill her, kill her, kill her’ and my son clung to me even more tightly.
“It happened in seconds, the worst seconds of my life. As a mother, I always felt like a ‘superwoman’ who could always protect my child, put him first. But I felt extremely vulnerable. There I was, almost certain I was going to die.”
She said she threw her bag at the armed suspects and ran with her son, aware she could be shot in the back at any moment.
Carvalho added that they had to dodge an oncoming car and that she fell and injured herself, needing treatment at a local hospital.
She told local media: “I already spoke to my son about situations like this because, about three weeks ago, while coming back from my gym, we saw a robbery on the other side of the road and my son was very scared.
“We quickened our step and went into a cafeteria. I told him that if anything like that happened to us, he should stay quiet, not react, and not say anything.”
According to the news site G1, some of the belongings in the victim’s handbag were found by a male pedestrian who picked them up and later returned them to her.
Carvalho said: “I’m really scared, so is my son. He didn’t want to go to school that day. He still doesn’t want to go to school, he just wants to be with me and I feel extremely helpless. I admit that I’m afraid to go out with him. I always felt safe before, because of that thing about mothers protecting their children, but I’m pretty shaken up.”
The local police have confirmed that they are investigating the incident. No arrests have been made yet.
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Story By: Lee Bullen, Sub-Editor: James King, Agency: Newsflash
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