Police in Spokane, Washington are on the hunt for a man who brazenly snatched a 22-month-old baby boy in front of his young siblings. The screams of the boy’s 8-year-old sister alerted 2 teenagers who gave chase, Yahoo News reports. The man put the baby down and fled the scene on foot. Police don’t believe he is from the area.
“We don’t believe him to be a local at this point,” Lincoln County Sheriff Wade Magers said Tuesday. “We’d recognize him if he was local.”
Magers said the boy’s father, Michael Wright, left the boy and his 2 siblings with a babysitter. The children — Brenden, 10, Delicia, 8, and the boy — were playing unsupervised in a park near the babysitter’s home, Wright said.
“I can’t explain the feeling, the anxiety and everything,” Wright said to KXLY-TV about getting a phone call that someone had tried to kidnap his son.
The bold kidnapping attempt was captured on surveillance video from a nearby grocery store.
Sheriff’s deputies said the man is seen chatting with the kids for a few minutes, then he snatched the toddler out of his stroller and sprinted down the street with Delicia and Brenden in close pursuit.
Delicia’s screams caught the attention of shop owner Dorothy Giddings. “I said there is something wrong,” Giddings told a reporter on Tuesday. “The girl said, ‘That man got my baby brother! That man got my baby brother!'”
Giddings said she told her grandson Andrew Crane, 15, and his friend Isaac Yow, 16, to go after the man.
As the teenagers caught up to the man, he put the baby down in a vacant lot and ran, Magers told reporters.
“He went around a corner and disappeared,” Giddings said. “Somehow he disappeared from the face of the earth.”
The suspect who is still at large is described as Mexican or Hispanic descent, about 30 years old, between 6-foot and 6-foot-2, with brown hair and a mustache.
President Obama’s controversial executive order gives amnesty to millions of illegal Mexicans and other foreigners crossing the borders.
Last month, a Texas judge issued a preliminary injunction putting a stop to Obama’s illegal plans to import voters to help Democrats control the Senate and the White House in 2016.
