SMYRNA, Ga. — A metro Atlanta delivery driver has not returned to work after a man pretending to be an officer pulled a gun on her during one of her deliveries.
“I picked this area specifically because I felt safe there,” the woman, who chose not to be identified, told Channel 2′s Matt Johnson.
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For more than a year, she has delivered packages in a Smyrna neighborhood and felt safe, until the day she thought her life was going to end.
“I still have nightmares. I can still see him pointing the gun at me,” she said.
It was last week at a house on Forest View Trail when she says she was delivering a package and the man who lives at the house confronted her and said she needed to show identification.
“He came around the car and he had the gun pointed like directly at me. He was telling me that he was a cop,” she recalled.
Smyrna police say he wasn’t a police officer at all, however. They say he was impersonating an officer.
“I’m a Black woman, and he does have a gun. I’m going to try to give you what you’re asking for. But at the same time, it’s like I knew that wasn’t the procedure, even out of uniform,” she said.
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Even though she was panicked, she called 911 and when Smyrna police arrived, they say Chad Diefenderfer, 43, showed them an expired badge.
When officers checked with the sheriff’s office in Barbour County, Alabama where the badge was from, the office said they had no idea who he was.
“I don’t, I don’t know what made him feel like that it was OK to him lie to me and say he was a cop,” she told Johnson.
Diefenderfer was arrested and charged with two felonies before he bonded out of jail. The victim said she is worried that it may happen again and has not returned to work.
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“I think that’s gonna change my life for the rest of my life. Because it doesn’t make sense because I was just at work,” she said.
Johnson went by the suspect’s house to get his side of the story, but no one came to the door.
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