A 1-year-old baby boy was abandoned on the side of a busy road in New Orleans after his mother’s SUV was carjacked at a gas station.
The infant was luckily found unharmed and sitting near the Almonaster Boulevard overpass late Wednesday morning.
Brian Stewart, a motorist passing by, said he initially mistook the boy for a baby doll on the side of the road when he was traveling to a local landfill.
“As I got closer I realized that was a real person there,” Stewart said. “I pulled to the side of the road. Walked back. The baby started kinda crawling toward me. I called 911.”
Police rescued the toddler and later arrested the suspected carjacker, 21-year-old Johnathon Perkins, in New Orleans. He now faces charges of auto theft, aggravated kidnapping of a child and illegal possession of stolen property.
According to police officials, Perkins was at Chevron gas station in Chalmette, Louisiana, at around 11 a.m. on Wednesday when he spotted a woman fueling up her white Subaru Outback.
Unknown to the suspect, the female driver’s 1-year old son was napping in the backseat.
“I think he picked the wrong place and the wrong car to steal here in St. Bernard Parish,” Sheriff Jimmy Pohlmann said.
The sheriff added that the woman momentarily left her SUV running with her son still inside to get change from the cashier. When she came back out, she found her vehicle missing.
Surveillance camera footage from the area showed a man in an orange construction vest, later identified as Perkins, walking towards the woman’s Subaru, getting into the driver’s seat and driving away.
A woman who works at a nearby casino told the station that when the mother discovered that her car with her son inside was gone, she became hysterical.
“She was screaming… ‘My baby, my baby, my baby,’” the witness recounted.
The sheriff said that after making his getaway, Perkins drove down Paris Road and over a bridge into New Orleans, where he ditched the stolen vehicle after dumping the baby by the side of the road.
“It’s an event that could have turned out really bad for the one-year-old being left on the interstate,” Sheriff Pohlmann said. “The baby could have crawled into a lane of traffic and could have been easily killed.”
The infant has since been reunited with his parents.