The woman said she was in the store's bathroom when she heard the door chime.
"When I came out, nobody was in the store so I went to go wash my hands and get my hand sanitizer and as soon as I took one step behind the counter when I was putting on my sanitizer, that’s when I saw him coming," she said. "I made eye contact with him first and then I saw the bandana on his face. I immediately knew no good was about to come from that situation."
The man hopped over the store's counter and put the gun to the back of the woman's head and asked for her car keys, she said.
"I point down to where my car keys are in my purse. He takes my keys, nothing else," she said. "Just my keys and then leads me out of the store to my car with a gun to the back of my head. He put me inside of my car in the driver’s seat and I begged and pleaded, 'Please don’t hurt me. Please don’t hurt me,' because I’m a mom. I wanted to go home. I wanted to see my baby at the end of the night. He said, 'I don’t want to hurt you. I just want this,' and he slapped the inside of my car. I was like, 'You can have it, you can have it,' and he was like, 'No, you’re driving.'"
She said they stopped in an empty parking lot in Surfside Beach, where she was forced into the trunk at gunpoint. At that point, she didn’t know what the man’s plans were.
“He was like, ‘I don’t want to hurt you. I just have to take care of something. I have to take care of something,’” she said. “He said that he wasn’t going to hurt me, he wasn’t going to hurt me. But I think he was a liar. I don’t think he would have let me live when he got to where he was going.”