By CAROLINE STRAINIG
A PORT Macquarie mother has warned other parents to be on the alert after a strange encounter her children had with an unidentified male.
“There may be absolutely nothing sinister to it, but it was very strange and I thought I should warn other parents,” the mother said.
“If there is an innocent explanation for it, we would like this man to come forward so we know there is no danger. If it wasn’t innocent, well, everyone needs to be on the alert.”
Requesting their names and surnames not be used for security reasons, the mother said her son, 11, and daughter, 7, were waiting for their school bus at a bus stop in Forest Grove on Wednesday morning when a man approached them.
“He was in his late thirties or early forties and wearing a white shirt, dark pants, white runners, sunglasses and a white cap,” the mother said.
“He told the children he was from the bus company and started to ask personal questions such as where they lived, what time they caught the bus and what time they got off the bus.”
Her son immediately felt something was wrong.
“Firstly, as the man approached them he appeared to be making notes in a notepad, but the top of his ballpoint pen was not pressed down, so he could not have been actually writing,” the mother said.
“The man also had no identifying insignia on his shirt and also some of the questions such as where they lived were of too personal a nature.”
Her daughter, too, felt something was strange and took shelter behind her brother, who answered only a few of the man’s questions – avoiding the more personal ones – before their bus came. What really cemented her son’s disquiet was that when their bus arrived and he and his sister started walking towards it, he glanced back and saw the man taking photos of them with his smart phone.
During all this time, unbeknownst to the strange male, their mother was still parked across the street watching carefully.
“I knew I could be there in a second, so I was waiting to see what the man would do,” she said.
“If I had known the personal nature of some of the questions I would have been over straight away.”
When the man started taking photos, she got out her on iPhone and took photos of him taking photos.
After the children’s bus left, the man walked away on foot. The mother followed him but lost him soon afterwards.
Her son immediately reported the incident to staff at the school, and she also went directly to the police, who sent two detectives to the school within the hour to interview her son. Police also promised to mount extra patrols.
“I have contacted the bus company and also two local P&Cs and none of them were conducting a survey, so the man could not have been from them,” the mother said.
“I am hoping it was nothing, but you just never know. I’m very thankful that both my chidren have had stranger danger training at school and knew there was something to be worried about.”
