‘Catch this concrete maniac before someone is killed’

Mother-of-two Lisa Horne, 26, said she believed “somebody was looking over me” after she and her 48-year-old mother emerged unharmed when their Vauxhall Astra was targeted on the A12 in Essex on Thursday evening.

And she said the perpetrator must be caught before someone is killed.

“If I was going any faster, it may have been a different story,” she told a news conference.

“I am scared to drive, I don’t think I will be driving in the dark. I certainly won’t be going down the A12,” she said.

“I have got two young children. I am scared that I may never have come home to them.

Ms Horne’s mother Stella told the news conference: “I remember seeing, like, a shadow coming down from the sky, and there was the biggest explosion. That was a rock hitting the car.

“At the time I thought it was something off an aeroplane.”

She said she was “so proud” of her daughter and how she handled the incident. “I went into mum mode and started shouting,” she said.

Asked what she thought of the perpetrator, she added: “I just don’t know how they went home that night and slept, when they could have killed four people in half an hour. I can’t sleep, thinking about it.”

The incident happened under the Fryerning Lane Bridge near Ingatestone. Forty minutes later, a 57-year-old woman was left with fractures to her face and ribs and internal injuries when a “bucket-sized” piece of concrete was dropped on to her vehicle from a different bridge on the same stretch of road between Chelmsford and London.

Police are treating both incidents as attempted murder.