Someone stole a parked SUV with a sleeping toddler in the back seat from outside a San Francisco corner store Friday, left the vehicle a few blocks away and then bolted on foot before police arrived.
The 2-year-old girl—who was found crying in the car 11 minutes later—appeared to be unharmed, the San Francisco Police Department confirmed to The Standard.
SFPD says officers from its Taraval Station responded at 4:26 p.m. Friday to a report of a vehicle stolen from Ashton and Holloway avenues in Ingleside.
At 4:37 p.m., officers found the SUV and the girl by Capitol and Ocean avenues. But the suspect was gone.
NBC Bay Area's—whose SkyRanger helicopter captured footage of the girl being reunited with her father—spoke to the dad shortly after the incident.
According to the NBC report, the father left his sleeping daughter in the back seat while he ran into Cool Guys Market on Holloway Avenue—and found her and the car missing when he came back out.
"Before I could even purchase something, someone got in my car and took off with my truck with my daughter in it," he told the news station. "It was like a kidnapping."
Jamil Tawasha—who owns Homrun Liquors, another corner market by where the SUV was abandoned—told NBC he saw the white vehicle careen around the corner and come to an abrupt stop before the suspect hopped out and ran away.
"I walked up, I've seen the car, I've seen a baby crying in there," Tawasha told the the news station, "and two minutes after I seen that, a whole bunch of officers and a helicopter came."
'It's Traumatizing for Everyone'
Though comprehensive data is hard to come by, advocacy nonprofit Kids and Car Safety says the number of cars stolen with children inside has been trending upward over the past decade—except for a couple-year dip during the pandemic.
The number of incidents involving kids 14 and younger nationwide went from 68 in 2012 to 265 last year, according to the safety group. But that's a vast underestimate, Kids for Car Safety founder Janette Fennell clarified.
"The government's supposed to track this data," Fennell told The Standard by phone Saturday, "but they're not consistent."
Fennell founded her nonprofit to push for greater awareness about non-traffic car safety after someone took her own child in a carjacking decades ago.
In 1995, Fennell and her husband were kidnapped at gunpoint and driven through San Francisco to a secluded spot where they were left for dead in the trunk. They later found out that the carjacker left their 9-month-old baby—who had been in the back seat of the sedan—on the front porch of the Fennell home.
Fennell spent the ensuing decades pushing for better car safety by lobbying for public awareness about the dangers of vehicles beyond just crashes on public roadways, better data collection and new laws.
In California, Fennell's group lobbied for what came to be known as Kaitlyn's Law, which since 2001 has made it illegal for a child younger than 6 years old to be left alone in a car without supervision from someone who's at least 12.
One of the reasons Fennell believes more children are being taken in stolen cars is because of the growing number of vehicle thefts.
In cities like San Francisco, where double-parking is common for delivery drivers, she said gig workers with children in tow could also be driving the trend.
That's what happened to a San Francisco DoorDash driver named Jeffrey Fang in early 2021, when his 1-year-old and 4-year-old kids were whisked away by a thief who took off with the Honda Odyssey he left parked while dropping off a food delivery. Police reunited Fang with his kids hours later after his silver minivan was found abandoned across town.
Car thefts tend to be crimes of opportunity, Fennell said. But she's also heard of cases where people call in fake orders specifically to get gig workers to leave their cars parked with the keys in the engine.
"People probably don’t realize that thieves hang around in places like convenience stores or gas stations or places like that because they know people let their guard down," Fennell said, "and before they could come out, their car's gone and their kid's gone."
More often than not, the car thief ditches the car once they realize there's a kid in the back seat, she said. Or they leave the kid on the side of the road.
"Either way," Fennell said, "it's traumatizing for everyone."
And it's totally preventable.
"People just need to think it through," she said. "That's really what it comes down to."