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Oakland, CA (KPIX) — Khahn Mac had the scariest fifteen minutes of her life last year, thanks to a Lyft driver and now she’s suing the ride-hailing company for it.
Her attorney, John Winer, calls what happened “a kidnapping, kind of an unusual one, but a kidnapping case all the same.”
It happened last year when Khanh dropped her car at the Oakland Toyota dealership for service. They called Mac a Lyft to get home and when it arrived, Mac says she put booster seats and her two children into the car.
She says when she went to buckle them up instead of waiting for her to finish and get into the car, the Lyft driver took off, taking her five- and six-year-old daughters with him.
“I couldn’t stand up,” Mac says, “because the moment [the manager of the dealership] called the driver and he didn’t answer I almost fainted right there.”
Mac claims the driver was gone for a quarter hour before finally answering the dealership manager’s phone call and only returned after being threatened with an Amber alert.
Mac’s daughters haven’t been the same since, she says. They’ve experienced nightmares, timidity and an over-attachment to their mother, Mac says. She’s suing for emotional damages for them all and she hopes Lyft will change its policies.
“Its very clear that Lyft is responsible,” says Winer, “they have to do a better job of making sure that safe drivers are with customers, maybe even do something special with drivers who carry kids. But this man should not have been driving anybody and he should not be kidnapping the kids.”
Lyft told us they could not respond to the complaint because it was only filed the yesterday.
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