A TikTok user known for documenting her progress leading up to a half-marathon shared a chilling video that showed her being followed by a man in a car during one of her runs - once again bringing the importance of women's safety into the spotlight.
Samantha McIntyre is no stranger to posting on the video-sharing platform, regularly keeping her followers up-to-date on how her journey to running a half-marathon is progressing to her 318,000 followers. This run, however, was different than usual - with the experience making her "really nervous."
In the viral video - which has over two million likes - the 24-year-old notices the same red truck passing her multiple times.
"There's this guy in a red car that's driven by me twice, and every time he drives by me he has his arm out the window and he's, like, looking behind when he's driving by... it's making me really nervous," she says in the video, halfway through her run.
"I haven't seen him in 10 minutes, but I don't know if I'm being paranoid. Just documenting this, just in case," she adds.
Following this, McIntyre describes the model and make of the car. In the next clip, she says that the car is parked up ahead of the track, which made her "nervous" - especially as she says in the video that she needs to pass the suspicious driver on the way back to her own vehicle.
McIntyre shows viewers a small clip of the car parked under a tree in the distance, before stating: "It's just one of those things where you think it's not going to happen to you [...] I don't want to risk anything."
She then ends up calling her parents to come and pick her up, crying to the camera and sobbing: "I don't know what to do."
Upon seeing the car beginning to pull out of its parked position, the fast-thinking woman runs to a nearby house and asks the owners if she can wait in their yard for her parents. Police located the man but no charges against him have been filed.
This situation is all too familiar with most women, who always have to be cautious and hyper-aware of their surroundings when going out alone, regardless of the time of day.
Some men have even joked about stalking women as "harmless psychological fun," with one person posting on an old Reddit thread that they liked to stalk women to deliberately scare them - despite not wishing to harm them.
"The feeling when you follow a girl and she notices you, and she tries to [lose] you or picks up the pace. That is kind of a good feeling. You become important to her. You are no longer some random insignificant face in the crowd [...] If you know your limits and don't actually harass - let alone rape - that girl, it should be harmless psychological fun," the post read.
McIntyre's video serves as a stark reminder to all women to trust their gut feeling - especially as her frightening experience came weeks after 34-year-old Eliza Fletcher, from Memphis, Tennessee, was kidnapped and murdered while on a morning jog, TODAY reported.
"Please be aware of your surroundings when you are going on runs. Carry protection with you, just be safe. If you have a gut feeling that something doesn't feel right please go with that gut feeling," McIntyre added at the end of her video.
While the ideal situation would be that women wouldn't have to constantly be super vigilant as soon as they leave the safety and comfort of their homes, the current world we all live in still requires us to do this. After all, it's better to be safe than sorry.
