By LACHLAN MOORHEAD
A GOOD Samaritan who saved a man she believed to be intellectually disabled from being hit by passing cars near Fountain Gate Shopping Centre last weekend is incensed that no other drivers stopped to help him.
Pauline-Marie Tiglar, whose 15-year-old daughter Anastasia also suffers from an intellectual disability, was driving along Narre Warren North Road to the shopping centre about 2pm on Saturday 21 February when she saw the man – wearing no shoes or shirt, only shorts – “darting in between the traffic coming into Westfield”.
Ms Tiglar parked her car at the nearby Bob Jane T-Mart and ran to help the man who was outside in the 35-plus degree heat.
“How many selfish, ignorant people simply drove past ignoring him?” Ms Tiglar, from Narre Warren, said this week.
“I didn’t, and couldn’t!”
Ms Tiglar said a few weeks ago she saw several people stop their cars and jump out to save a stray dog at the same location.
“It was just a couple of weeks ago that people stopped because a dog jumped out from a car window but they wouldn’t stop to save this man,” she said.
While her friend called the police, Ms Tiglar tried to talk to the man and guide him to safety but he took off and ran into the shopping centre.
Chasing after him on foot, Ms Tiglar followed the man into Fountain Gate and then back outside again and onto the road where the ambulance and police eventually retrieved him.
“The ambulance had to do a U-turn at the lights as the man had run across the road, it was very distressing,” she said.
The man was taken to Narre Warren Police Station where his carer is understood to have been waiting for him.
Ms Tiglar also went to the station after the incident but the man had already left and she never got his name.
Ms Tiglar cares for her daughter Anastasia who suffers from a rare chromosome abnormality known as 1p36 deletion syndrome (mosaicism).
She is believed to be one of only two registered people in the world who have that specific condition.
As a result of her chromosome condition Anastasia has an intellectual disability and global developmental delay.
“She was born disabled, she needed me and that gave me life,” Ms Tiglar said.
“It gave me a full purpose in life because no-one else was going to protect her like a mum.”
