An Amber Alert was issued Thursday evening when a car was stolen with two children inside.
The entire ordeal lasted about an hour in total, but it’s an experience the kids, and likely the mother, won’t forget quickly.
A relative of the two children, too shaken up to speak, said the kids' mother did everything she could to help her children, even chasing the car up the unit block of N. Port St. near Patterson Park.
The children were found an hour later and less than a half mile away in the 200 block of N. Castle St.
“We called a medic to that location as an absolute precaution just to make sure the kids were okay, but no injuries,” said Det. Jeremy Silbert, a Baltimore Police spokesman.
Police said the keys were in the ignition.
It happened at about 6 p.m., police said, which was right about the time Sapp was returning home from work.
“As soon as I got home, my neighbor was crying and standing there with her sister,” said Jason Sapp, a neighbor to the woman whose boys were in the vehicle -- a 19-month-old and a 4-year-old — when the suspect got in and drove away.
Surveillance video from a home on the block captured the suspect jumping in, an image police blasted on Twitter in their frantic search for the kids.
Sapp, thinking of his own daughter, jumped in his car and went looking.
"I have a 14-and-a-half-year-old daughter, so I just put myself in their shoes,” Sapp said. “Honestly, they’re my neighbors, so I do know them; that’s part of it. But I probably would have done it for anybody."
The relative said the mother had just finished dressing her children, stepping inside briefly before heading out again. The small window of opportunity was all that the suspect, described as a while male, about 30 years old, wearing a grey sweatshirt with “Nike” written in green, needed to jump in her car and take off.
Police are still looking for the suspect and the vehicle.
It’s a grey 2007 Saturn Ion with Maryland plates 6CE3859.
If you have any information, you should call 911.
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