A shellshocked Victorian plans to leave the state after being traumatised by a gang of armed African thugs who tried to storm his home and then smashed up his car during an attempted Facebook Marketplace robbery.
Disturbing security camera footage shows one of the robbers, who was wearing a face mask and carrying a knife, arrive at a home in the Melbourne suburb Ascot Vale late last month pretending to buy a laptop by showing a fake bank website as supposed proof of pre-payment.
But when the homeowner told him to get off his property he started making threats.
“I have your address bro,” he said. “Remember, your car is right here.”
CCTV footage shows an accomplice smashing the windows of the victim’s SUV with a metal baton moments later, before all three men left in a stolen Ford Falcon.
Their threats to return have left the victim living in fear weeks on, he told 7News.
“[It has] weighed heavy on my mind since the entire incident,” he said, and revealed that in December his car was stolen, allegedly by a teenager now charged with the murder of Dr Ash Gordon, who was stabbed to death trying to stop a home invasion.
“It’s made me not want to live in Victoria anymore. I’m leaving the state, literally over crime, nothing else.”
No arrests have been made so far.
Another Facebook Marketplace robbery took place in Truganina in Melbourne’s west in recent days, where a snatch-and-grab African thief ran off with a brand new iPhone.
And days before that former Victoria Police officer Krystle Mitchell responded to a similar incident in Wyndham Vale by revealing that police North Melbourne shut down an operation targeting African armed robbers because of “racist optics” in 2018.
That was the same year Victoria Police started leaving out the nationality of offenders from their publicly released crime statistics, where Africans were heavily overrepresented.
