A Massachusetts woman drove her SUV down a mall's second floor corridor, authorities said Thursday, stunning store clerks and shoppers at the South Shore Plaza in suburban Boston.
Cell phone video and photos captured the slow-moving Lincoln MKX driving past baffled onlookers and stores at the mall in Braintree just before noon.
In a news release, the city's police department identified the driver only as an elderly woman. It wasn't clear why she drove through the mall 12 miles south of Boston.
The woman drove across a pedestrian bridge from a parking garage and entered the mall through automatic double doors where a safety post had been removed after a recent accident, the department said.
She then drove 60 yards — a little over half the length of a football field — down the second floor’s main corridor, the release said.
"When I looked up, there was a car like right in the corner of my window,” Stacy Bartkos, a store clerk, told NBC Boston. "She came in, took a left and somebody finally stopped her."
Another woman, Janet Parsons, told the station she stopped the SUV and the driver asked: "Do you know how to get out of here?"
"I said, 'Stay right here, I'll get somebody,'" Parsons recalled to the station. "And then she kept on creeping forward."
Moments later, as the driver appeared to get stuck on a section of the mall's interior, she put her foot on the gas pedal and her wheels started spinning, Parsons told the station.
"It's a blessing no one got hurt," she told NBC Boston.
No injuries were reported, the department said. The driver hit a planter and knocked over other items.
No charges have been filed in the case, the release said. The department asked that woman's driver’s license be immediately suspended.
A mental health clinician evaluated the woman before she was taken to a hospital, police said.
