A 1-year-old infant boy was found abandoned on the side of a busy road in New Orleans, Louisiana, after his mother’s SUV was carjacked at a gas station last week.
A good Samaritan, Motorist Brian Stewart, miraculously found the baby boy unharmed sitting near the Almonaster Boulevard overpass late Wednesday morning.
Stewart told reporters that he was on his way to a landfill when he spotted what he initially mistook for “an object” or a “baby doll” on the side of the road.
“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.”
Responding officers rescued the child and later apprehended the suspected carjacker, identified as 21-year-old Johnathon Perkins, in New Orleans. Perkins was taken into custody and charged with auto theft, aggravated kidnapping of a child and illegal possession of stolen property.
According to police investigators, the suspect 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.
However, the suspect did not know that the woman’s 1-year-old son was napping in the back seat of the vehicle.
“I think he picked the wrong place and the wrong car to steal here in St. Bernard Parish,” Sheriff Jimmy Pohlmann told WWLTV.
According to the sheriff, the woman momentarily left her SUV running with her son still inside to get change from the cashier. When she came back out, her vehicle was nowhere to be found.
Surveillance footage from the area showed Perkins in an orange construction vest walking toward the woman’s vehicle, getting into the driver’s seat and driving off.
A female witness who works at a nearby casino told responding officers that when the mother discovered that her vehicle with her son inside was gone, she became hysterical.
“She was screaming… ‘My baby, my baby, my baby,’” the witness recounted.
According to investigators, Perkins drove down Paris Road and over a bridge into New Orleans, where he ditched the stolen car 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 child has since been reunited with his parents.
