Suzanne Glichrist, hit pedestrian Stuart Morris with her car and continued to drive while Morris desperately hung on to the hood of the car to save his life. The prosecutor Emma White said that Gilchrist, a mother-of-one, was trying to escape a security officer from a shopping mall after being accused of stealing aftershave.
When the guard tried to open the car door and seize her car keys, she drove away. Morris, an innocent passerby happened to be on the wrong spot and Suzanne drove into him with her car. Morris jumped on to the hood and hung on while Gilchrist sped away weaving from side to side, trying to dislodge Morris without any concern for his life.
The drama ended when Gilchrist was held up at a traffic signal and came to a halt. Police arrived and arrested Gilchrist. Stuart Morris suffered from spinal bruising and bruising his legs and fingers. He was lucky to get away without being killed.
Gilchrist’s lawyer Rhona McLeod said “She had thought that she was pregnant and was obviously suffering from some sort of hormonal imbalance, and was on such a knife-edge that she panicked.”
Gilchrist pleaded guilty to assaulting Morris, and trying to throw him off from her car causing risk to his life. She also pled guilty to failing to stop at intersections. However she did not plead guilty to stealing the bottle of aftershave.
Morris said, “I saw her arguing with the guard then, as I crossed the road, bang, she hit me… If it’d been a child she hit, the child would have been killed, as they wouldn’t have been able to hang on…. No one like that should be free.”
The prosecutor told the court, with her words backed by the cctv footage, “She was driving really fast, swerving all over the road, and trying to force him off the bonnet.”
Gilchrist had driven at least 350 yards with Stuart Morris clinging to the Ford Focus.
The court ordered 4 years in prison for Gilchrist.