Yoshito Harada who is a 32-year-old Japanese man has been apprehended for allegedly puncturing a woman’s tire just so he could follow her and offer assistance when she eventually stopped to check the wheel.
In what can be described as a bizarre incident, the man from Japanese town, to Aichi Prefecture, slashed the tire of a 43-year-old woman on June 11 in a bid to get her attention.
The woman walked out of the supermarket in Higashiura, went to her car and drove away. She didn’t get very far before noticing that her driver’s side front tire was almost completely flat, so she pulled over to check it out.
The culprit posing as a friendly Samaritan stopped his car next to hers and offered to help fix her flat but the woman quickly realized that the same thing had happened to her just a year before. Not only that, but the man also looked suspiciously familiar too.
She notified the Japanese police and explained that the same “accident” happened about a year before.
Police checked the surveillance camera of the supermarket and discovered that the man who had helped the woman fix her flat tire had slashed it only minutes before she walked out of the supermarket.
Harada admitted to the crime, telling police that he had only done it as an excuse to get to know the woman.
However, it may have been forgivable had it not also ben discovered that it wasn’t just a one-time thing for Harada. He had done it quite a few times in the past.
When last month’s incident made national news, a few people commented about a strangely similar case dating back to 2013 involving a man also named Harada, who was 25 at the time, cam from the same town and slashed women’s tires as a way to approach them. Back then, his lawyer claimed that Harada had slashed women’s tires at least 1,000 times.
SoraNews24 recently reported that back in 2013 Yoshito Harada managed to avoid jail time for his repeated tire slashing by compensating the few victims that came forward with 30,000 yen ($279) each. He also agreed to wear a GPS tracking bracelet so his parents could monitor his whereabouts and ensure that he stayed out of trouble.
But dodging the bullet once wasn’t enough for Harada to change his ways. In 2016, he was once again taken into police custody after one of his victims called an acquaintance who had also suffered the same accident and had received assistance from the very same 28-year-old man, just a few month prior. Interestingly, the same kind of coincidence had led to his original arrest in 2013.
It is unclear how many times he has committed the crime but it is believed by his lawyers in 2013 that he has done it over 1,000 and actually targeted the same woman twice in one year.
Two of his victims are two women who knew each other on at least two occasions.
Despite the tire slashing, he has been unable to hit it off with any of the women.