PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Philly police are searching for the person who stole a running car from a Germantown grocery store parking lot while a 6-year-old boy was sleeping in the back seat.
The boy’s mother pulled into the Save A Lot parking lot on Pulaski Avenue, near Rittenhouse Street, shortly after midnight on Friday.
She kept the car running as her 6-year-old son slept in the back seat while she went shopping, Chief Inspector Scott Small said. When she exited the store, her car was nowhere to be found.
The woman called police, who handled the situation as an abduction.
“Got a good description of the vehicle, the year, the color, the license plate number, and we read that information out citywide,” Small said.
It turned out that the car was not far. A half-hour later, officers found it parked a block away on West Chelten Avenue. The boy was unharmed and still asleep. The person or people who took the car were not there.
“It was a crime of opportunity,” Small said. “They stole the vehicle because the engine was running. And when they got in the vehicle, at some point they must have realized that there was a 6-year-old sleeping in the back seat, and that’s when they parked it and abandoned it.”
The boy, who had a cast on his leg and was believed to have just received treatment for an injury, was reunited with his mother. Police took them both to the Special Victims Unit for further questioning.
Investigators plan to look through the car for fingerprints and other evidence. There are also surveillance cameras at the store and at the location where the car was recovered.