A Fort Worth Police officer rescued a kidnapped baby from a carjacking gone wrong and the footage is haunting.
In a truly horrifying cautionary tale for why children should never be left unattended in a motor-vehicle, a new mother left her six-month old baby in the backseat of her car and he was taken.
She was visiting her brother to drop off an item, and left her son in his carrier in the backseat of her still running car for less than two minutes on Monday.
That’s when opportunistic carjacker Elliot Reyes hopped into the vehicle and sped off with the baby still inside.
A neighbor who witnessed the car theft and likely unintended kidnapping called the police, and they were dispatched to the Fort Worth neighborhood.
Dozens of law enforcement officers canvased the area in search of the missing infant and got a break half-an-hour later.
The stolen vehicle was found a mile and a half from the residence it was snatched from. The thief was still inside, but the baby was not in the backseat.
“We were freaking out at that moment. We had no baby,’ Fort Worth Police Sergeant Ronnie Chau told FOX 4 Dallas.
Police arrested Reyes and pressed him for information on the baby’s whereabouts.
“We put him in a vehicle and had him direct us to where the baby was,” Chau detailed.
An hour-and-a-half after the boy was reported missing, Chau was the one to discover the baby, who was dangerously abandoned amongst trash at the dead end of a residential street.
In the body camera footage, Chau can be seen sprinting towards the baby and lifting him out of the carrier, while he comforted him.
Chau said the carrier was tipped precariously and the infant was dangling from the straps with one of his little feet in the dirt.
The baby was checked out by paramedics and cleared of any medical issues, before he was reunited with his mother.
Chau recalled that she was “very happy” but crying while she embraced her child. The sergeant said he was “elated” that the baby was found safely.
Family members of the infant said they knew who Reyes was, and that he could often be seen riding around the neighborhood on a bicycle, which was found abandoned near where the car went missing from
He has been charged with auto theft, kidnapping, and endangering a child’s welfare.
