Deanna Gotchie said her four-year-old child is having a hard time talking about the ordeal the entire family survived earlier this week.
“Our oldest kind of forgot how to talk, for a little bit,” she said. “His words were just kind of mumbled, and he normally speaks in full sentences.”
The child was strapped into the family SUV with three siblings—all younger—when their father, Derek Gotchie, jumped out to close the back door on Wednesday night. The family from Burnsville was dropping off some items at a friend’s house on Russel Avenue North in Minneapolis.
In that ten seconds he was out of the vehicle, Gotchie said a man who had just driven up in a stolen van ran and jumped in the SUV, put it in gear, and took off—with the four kids inside.
Gotchie said he had one thought and one thought only: “I’m jumping in this van and I’m going after my truck. My kids are in there.”
He gave chase to his own vehicle, and when it pulled over while going the wrong way on a one-way street to let another car pass, Gotchie took his chance and rammed the back of the SUV with the van, pushing it into a fence.
“In my mind is: we’ve got to stop this before we hit the freeway. Once we hit the freeway, it’s a lot more dangerous,” said Gotchie on Friday morning. “The opportunity came, and I just thought, ‘Alright, this is where we’ve got to stop.’”
He said the driver got out and ran away, and after Gotchie confirmed his four kids in the SUV were okay, he called police.
“A truck can be replaced, but it’s our kids, you know? It’s our livelihood—that’s everything to us,” said Gotchie. “We realized all it takes is a couple of seconds and it can be taken away, and it’s scary.”
