COLOMBIA – A two-year-old girl and a puppy disappeared for three hours on February 9 after a man got into a car with the driver’s door open parked in front of a hotel in Lexington County.
Video released by police showed a man wearing a running suit casually stepping into a beige Lexus sedan from 2003 parked next to the front door of the Quality Inn hotel in Cayce and driving out just before 9 pm. A woman ran out of the hotel and ran after the car with the child and the dog inside.
Shortly after midnight, they were found in the car unharmed, 11 miles away, in Gaston.
Cayce police said on February 10 that a person of interest with ties to the Gaston community was in custody. No charges were filed.
The kidnapping that triggered an Amber alert across the state is a reminder that people need to lock their cars – even for the shortest of tasks, officials said.
“It’s something we are always reminding the community about,” said Capt. Adam Myrick, a spokesman for the Lexington County Sheriff’s Department.
Anti-theft technology, such as keyless entry systems and GPS, can help retrieve a car after being taken, but often thieves prefer to carry items inside them rather than the vehicle itself.
“Anything in a car, if it’s something that a thief can quickly grab and earn some money, it probably won’t be there in the morning,” said Myrick.
Amber Rollins, director of Kansas-based advocacy group KidsandCars.org, said a total of 400 children across the country were taken in stolen vehicles in 2018 and 2019, and since Saturday alone, there have been seven documented incidents.
“It’s just one of those things that people think will never happen to them, so I think the thinking process is, ‘What are the chances?'” Said Rollins. “It can really happen anywhere, anytime. It happens in well-lit areas. It happens in safe neighborhoods.”
Most car thieves who realize that a child is in the vehicle make rash decisions, said Rollins, creating a new potential for danger for their victims.
“They panic and generally what happens is that the child is thrown on the side of the road or abandoned in a vehicle, and they face a whole new set of dangers, especially if they are not found immediately,” she said.
In addition to vehicles parked in parking lots, Rollins said that abandonments at daycare centers and even driveways where a car is left to warm up in the winter or cool down in the summer can be targets.
“They look for places where they know people will be gone for a short time,” she said.
Theft of unsecured vehicles is a national problem, with 229,339 thefts between 2016 and 2018, an increase of more than 50% over the previous two-year period, according to a recent report by the National Insurance Crime Bureau.
“If we just locked our cars, we would totally change the narrative of the property crime that we read about, that we talk about, that is reported,” said Columbia Police Chief Skip Holbrook during a 2020 public safety update.
And, locally, open cars contribute to more serious crimes. In that security update, Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott held up a bunch of keys and hit the lock button on his remote.
“How difficult is that? Why don’t you do that? “, He said.” One of the biggest problems we have in the Columbia area is that we don’t lock our cars and guess where young people get the weapons that are here to commit the murders. “
Follow Adam Benson on Twitter @ AdamNewshound12.