My terror as concrete block smashed into car windscreen

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Rob Parsons12 April 2012

A woman told today of the terrifying moment when a concrete block was dropped from a bridge onto her car as she drove home from shopping.

Lisa Horne, 26, said she was lucky to be alive.

The mother-of-two was forced to swerve to the other side of the A12 when the block landed on the bonnet of her Vauxhall Astra as it passed under the Fryerning Lane Bridge near Ingatestone, in Essex, last Thursday night.

She said: "It was as if someone had put their hands over my eyes.

"I heard a bang and my windscreen shattered.

"I can't remember pulling over but I remember stopping on the hard shoulder, getting out of the car and realising what happened.

"It all happened so quickly. I swerved over to the other side of the road but I don't remember looking in my mirrors so it was lucky there was no other vehicles there. I feel like someone is watching over me. If I was going any faster it would be a different story."

Forty minutes later a 57-year-old woman was left with internal injuries and fractures to her face and ribs when a "bucket-sized" piece of concrete was dropped onto her car from a different bridge on the same stretch of road.

The woman, who is in a stable condition at Broomfield Hospital in Essex, was in the car with her husband, who was driving and suffered cuts and bruises. Police are treating both attacks as attempted murder.

Miss Horne, from Chelmsford, who lives with daughter Leale, seven, and son Stan, 11 months, spoke as police revealed the incidents could be linked with similar ones in 2008 and 2009. She said: "I can't understand why someone could do anything like that. They are not normal, they are not nice people. I am scared to drive now, I am scared I might not have come home to my children. It makes you realise how precious life is."

Her mother Stella, 48, said: "I don't know how they went home that night and slept. They could have killed four people in half an hour."

Police closed sections of the A12 just after 7.30pm yesterday after a woman reported seeing a man with a concrete "projectile" on top of the Wantz Road Bridge between Junctions 14 and 15, but the sighting turned out to be a false alarm.

There have been more than 30 similar cases on bridges along the A12 in Essex over the past three years. Anyone with information is asked to contact police on 0300 333 4444 or Crimestoppers on 0800 555111.

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