Meeting the wrong cab driver at the wrong time in the wrong place

It was about six months after my college graduation, I had just turned 22 and received a job offer at a startup in Brooklyn. I was flying in from Texas to New York for the first time for the interview - I landed at JFK, and just wanted to go to my hotel that my parents got me, get some rest, and hopefully get the job that next afternoon.<br><br>It was about 10 o'clock, and was in a group of other people leaving the airport, and looking around at where to go now. It was dark, and the tall buildings and crowded streets sort of intimidated me. I was going to take an Uber since I saw a few of them waiting, but one of the other people waiting for their rides said that she was going to walk down the street for a more affordable cab, since they were more common there than Ubers, and rideshare prices surge kind of easy near airports. <br><br>I decided to walk with her, because she seemed pretty confident where she was going, and it was a money saver, plus it seemed safe and nice to walk with someone else. After a few minutes, she hailed a yellow cab, and got in. She offered me to share the cab with her, so we both got in. She was going to an address in Manhattan. I told the driver the address of my hotel in Brooklyn, and told him that that is where we are headed and to take us there. He agreed, and we took off. <br><br>About 20 minutes into the ride, I noticed that we weren't on the right road anymore, and we passed a sign that read that we were in New Jersey now. This wasn't right, I tell the cabbie that he was supposed to take us to Brooklyn, not out of state. He tells me that he is taking us back to NYC, and then to Brooklyn. I asked why we can't go back to the original road we were taking, and he says that that road doesn't go to Brooklyn anymore. Now, I have GPS on my phone, and I saw that the original road did go straight to Brooklyn, and we were on it before. So I kind of knew he was lying, and we were in trouble.<br><br>I turned and whispered in her ear, "is this the right direction?" She was on her phone in the backseat. She looked at her GPS and saw that we were going way out of her way. The cabbie had heard us whispering and yelling at us, saying that we needed to stop asking him so many questions, or else he'd call the police on us for harassing him. This time, we kind of started freaking out, because it was dark, we were in this stranger's car, both of us alone and female, he was taking us who knows where, and we were going to miss our stops. <br><br>I pulled out my phone and acted like I was sending a text to my mom (which I kind of did, but just a quick "I'm in a cab and being taken somewhere, GPS location is *insert location here*"). I was actually acting like I was texting her, but really I was trying to get my phone in a position where the camera could get as much of his license plate info as possible, in case something else went wrong. <br><br>I asked him again why we couldn't go back to our original road, and he yelled at us again. The other girl started trying to get help from other cars by waving her phone and trying to get someone to stop. He yelled at her, saying that she was trying to get him in trouble and that he was going to call the police on her for using her phone to distract drivers and cause an accident. He actually started dialing and she put her phone up.<br><br>At this point, we were in the middle of no where and surrounded by woods, and both of our phones had no service. We were completely at this man's mercy. He could do anything to us, including kill us, and no one would know. We were completely silent and trying not to make any noise while trying to think of our next move. <br><br>After 10 minutes of driving through the woods, we came up to a red light. The car next to us was a police car, he was to the right of us, and we were directly next to him. I looked at him, and waved at him, and mouthed that we were in trouble, and that the driver had taken us somewhere that we didn't want to go. He looked at me kind of confused like "what the hell is this lady doing", and then waved back. <br><br>The driver saw me do it in his rear view mirror and started yelling at us, saying that we were trying to cause him more trouble. But it turned out to be opposite. It was him that was in trouble now. I'm not sure if the cop noticed something was up, but he flipped on his lights and pulled us over. Two police cars ended up pulling up, and two officers came up to the windows, one on each side, and asked us if we were okay. <br><br>We explained that we were trying to go to Brooklyn and Manhattan, but the driver took us an hour out of the way to some random place in the woods in New Jersey, and was yelling at us and trying to get us in trouble. The cop asked the driver for the addresses that we gave him, and for our IDs. We gave him our IDs and our correct addresses, and the driver tried to make up some random addresses that we never said, and tried to give him fake IDs. Obviously, that didn't work, and a couple minutes later, we were free to go, and sitting in the cop car, while the original driver was in handcuffs.<br><br>We ended up getting in the police car and riding with them to the police station, where we filed a report that the driver had kidnapped us and was planning on doing who-knows-what with us. They were able to track him down and get a full record on him, including past kidnappings that were similar to what we were in. We were sent home in a real cab, with an officer riding with us to our destinations, and the driver received a lengthy prison sentence.<br><br>So, driver with the yellow cab from JFK in which I was kidnapped in in 2015 and sent to a wooded area in New Jersey, let's not meet again.