A terrified woman believes she was stalked by the Bondi Junction killer in a storage facility just weeks before the massacre.
Linda S has a storage unit in the same place as Joel Cauchi, the 40-year-old Queenslander who murdered six people and injured many others at a Westfield on Saturday.
The killer had recently rented out the storage unit at Kennards storage located in inner Sydney’s Waterloo, with the contents now being investigated by police.
Two weeks before Cauchi’s killing spree, Linda S was visiting her own unit when she was followed by a black Mercedes before the driver approached her alone.
news.com.au cannot confirm whether the man who approached Linda was Cauchi, but she believes it was the same man.
She told news.com.au she was driving through Alexandria when she noticed a car following her from her rearview mirror.
Upon arriving, she immediately had an “eerie feeling” when she noticed the car had also come inside the storage facility.
The car followed her down to the area where her storage unit was located, but when she parked, the car kept driving past and returned to the facility’s entrance.
“I thought why would you come down here? To then park where you came in,” she said.
Feeling nervous about the interaction, she reached for a pocket knife she keeps on hand to deal with boxes and suddenly heard a man next to say say, “hey.”
Describing his tone as jarring and purposeful, she then turned around and found the mysterious, dark-haired man only a stride away from her.
Once he saw she had a knife in her hand, he immediately stepped back, she said, saying he thought she was someone else before running away.
“I don’t buy it. He saw my face when I walked past, and then came back when he knew I was alone,” she said.
Linda told news.com.au that she “believes it was” Cauchi.
She said that the receptionist team looked into the security footage and confirmed that the driver who followed her into the facility was the man who approached her.
“The storage unit and the police both said there was nothing they could do as he didn’t hurt me. It was just suspicious, not even a phone call to ask him questions,” she said.
Linda said she was now “terrified” and couldn’t stop thinking about what the man’s intentions were and why he had attempted to corner her.
“Why was he coming towards me so fast when I’m alone? And lastly, if I didn’t coincidentally have a weapon, would I be okay today?” she asked.
After the events of the weekend, the incident seems all the more disturbing.
“I posted last week about being approached in my storage unit by a strange man, and the local police station whom I called twice asking for help to investigate refused on both occasions,” she wrote.
Linda said that her experience made her feel like the “system is severely broken”, and she was so “heartbroken” for the victims and their loved ones.
“We are not safe, and we need to protect ourselves,” she wrote.
news.com.au has contacted NSW Police and Kennards for comment.