The fearless 11-year-old Bronx girl who escaped an attempted kidnapping this week recounted the frightening ordeal to The Post, describing how she shoved the stranger and ran to safety.
Fatima was walking home from school in Mott Haven at about 6 p.m., after dark, when she became separated from her older brother. A stranger approaching from the opposite direction then stopped her and began asking questions.
“I felt very nervous and shocked. I was scared,” she said.
“As soon as I passed him a little bit, he started asking questions,” Fatima recalled. “Where did I live, if I was 18.”
Fatima said no and attempted to continue walking, but the man approached her again—this time asking for a hug.
“He was like, ‘Can I have a hug?’ I was like, ‘No, no thank you,’” she said.
When he asked again, the encounter suddenly became physical.
“I didn’t answer him the second time, so he grabbed me hard,” Fatima said, demonstrating how the man seized her wrist.
She managed to pull her hand free, then “shoved him away and I started running,” she said.
Fatima’s mother, Fatoumata Jaiteh, said her daughter “was able to pinch him on the hand, get free and run back to her brother.” The siblings then returned to the school, where the dean called police.
Jaiteh described the would-be abductor as “a total stranger.”
Surveillance footage captured the man, but police were still searching for him.
Fatima’s mother said she was “panicked” when she learned what happened, especially because she had endured a similar attempted kidnapping while in high school.
“I know what it got me into, so I didn’t want my daughter to go through that, and especially [on] her birthday,” she said.
Despite the terrifying encounter, Fatima went home and celebrated her birthday with cake that night. She also bravely returned to school the following day.
“She is one of those kids that don’t like to be absent from school. She was going [to] school, even though I told her to stay home with me for the day, she said no,” Jaiteh said.