Diandra Toyos was shopping for a new family couch with her three kids – aged seven weeks, one and four – at her local IKEA when she says she noticed she was being followed by two men.
Sharing her experience on Facebook, Diandra, from Southern California, said she got “a bad feeling” when she saw a “well-dressed, middle-aged man circling the area, getting closer to me and the kids”.
"At one point he came right up to me and the boys, and instinctively I put myself between he and my [one-year-old] son," she wrote, in a post that has now been shared more than 102,000 times.
"He continued to circle the area, staring at the kids. He occasionally picked something up, pretending to look at it but looking right over at us instead."
When her son wandered off into a display room, she said the man "dropped what he was doing and quickly and closely followed us into the area".
It was then that Diandra's mother - who she was also shopping with the group - said she noticed another man, aged in his 20s, also following them.
"[We] decided to sit down and wait for them to move on. We had a gut feeling something was going on, but we hoped we were wrong and they would move on," Diandra wrote.
"So we sat in one of the little display rooms. For close to 30 minutes. And they sat too. They sat down on one of the couches on the display floor that faced us. That was when we knew our gut feeling was right and something was off."
After talking with an IKEA employee, using the bathroom and circling around the store, Diandra claimed she and her family managed to lose the two men.
"When we got through the maze of IKEA, we reported what happened to security," she said.
Top Comments
So, a man or some men were going to grab a child from a well lit Ikea store, with both mum and Grandma present, a store full of cameras, security, staff and other customers? Sounds like the world's most incompetent kidnapping plan to me. There are a lot of stories floating around Facebook and the internet like this, with very little in the way of proof to back them up. And by the way, at Ikea, you're going to be 'followed' by people, it's a one way system!
But man nearby must mean predator.
I thought everyone knew you have to make things up when you shop at IKEA.
They may have been trying to "listen in" for more information. And its super creepy whether innocent or not. Its also super creepy regardless of whether they are men or women. Their behaviour was very suspicious. She hid for 30 minutes and they still didnt move on?? CREEPY!
Right, and if you were sincerely concerned you would have immediately got the staff member to contact security.
I would have sat down then started taking photos of them with my phone.