Car Thief Improvises When He Discovers Baby in Vehicle With Him

A thief in Florida was forced to improvise after he discovered a baby in the car he had just stolen.

Police in West Palm Beach, Florida, are still searching for a man who stole a Kia Rio from a RaceWay gas station parking lot only to discover that there was a baby inside, WPTV 5 reports.

Authorities said that the unidentified man was caught on surveillance video arriving to a gas station in a white sports-utility vehicle at around 3:24 a.m. on Tuesday, March 20. He then got out of his vehicle and walked over to a black Kia Rio that had been left running, eventually getting inside and driving off, seemingly unaware of the 5-month-old baby in a car seat in the backseat.

Just minutes after driving off in the stolen vehicle, surveillance video from a Sunoco gas station not far away captured the thief pulling into the parking lot in the stolen vehicle and struggling for several minutes to try to get the baby’s car seat out of the car. The surveillance footage then shows the man carrying the car seat to the front door, where he passed the infant off to a clerk before making his escape.

“The doors were locked, so he came up and was banging on the door frantically. The overnight clerk came up to the door, and I guess shouted through the door, ‘What’s going on? He kept saying, ‘Take this baby, take this baby, so he just opened the door and took the baby and called the police from there,” Michelle Ashby, who works at a deli inside the gas station, said.

Police were called to the scene and the baby was unharmed.

The stolen vehicle was later discovered and a perimeter was set up as police searched for the man.

The investigation is still ongoing.