2-year-old was in car when it was stolen, Georgia cops say. Family’s iPad saved her
A missing child in a stolen car was found by Georgia police officers using an unlikely source — an iPad.
A woman reported to an Atlanta Police Department officer that someone stole her car at a Texaco gas station and drove away with her 2-year-old child inside, according to a Sept. 20 APD Facebook post. With the help of the family’s iPad, police located the child in under an hour on Sept. 5, the post’s video shows.
The woman told police that she stopped at the Texaco to pick up “some items for the baby,” an incident report said. When she went inside the gas station, she left the car running with the 2-year-old inside.
Someone then “jumped into the car,” the report says, and drove away. That’s when the woman found a police officer and reported what happened, the video shows.
The officers were preparing to search for the child, police say, but then the woman’s other child had a new piece of information that would help find the missing girl.
“Tell her, tell her,” the woman said in the video, beckoning the child to the officer.
The other child showed police a tracking app on a phone that was connected to the family’s iPad, which was still in the stolen car, the video shows. The child said in the video that the app showed the iPad was two minutes away in a field.
The iPad was nearly half a mile from the gas station, according to police, so other officers in the area went to locate the car. Two officers found the car in an empty grassy field, according to the report. The person who stole the car was not inside, police say.
The 2-year-old was in a car seat behind the passenger seat, but the vehicle was locked, according to the report. After getting permission from a supervisor to break a window to get the child out, one of the officers used a baton to crack the driver’s side window then unlocked the doors and got the child out, the report says.
The child was not injured, according to the report.
The child’s mother arrived at the scene where the car was left, the video shows. In a tearful reunion, an officer handed the woman her child and she hugged her, saying while crying, “I’m sorry.”
An investigation is still ongoing to find out who stole the car, an APD spokesperson told McClatchy News in an email.
This story was originally published September 21, 2023 at 11:15 AM with the headline "2-year-old was in car when it was stolen, Georgia cops say. Family’s iPad saved her."
