BATON ROUGE — A 22-month-old boy is safe after the pickup truck he was in Wednesday morning was stolen from a Baton Rouge gas station. As of Thursday, April 9th, BRPD says the suspect(s) in the case remains on the run and the mother is not expected to be charged at this time.
Around 7:15 a.m. on April 8th, Baton Rouge Police Department (BRPD) officers responded to a call about a stolen truck on Airline Highway. The victim at the scene told them her 22-month-old son was in the back seat of the truck when it was stolen.
“About 9:15, one of our detectives just driving in the area, and was able to locate the truck still running, parked on the side of the road, not too far from where he’d been stolen,” Baton Rouge Police Chief TJ Morse said. “They located the 22-month-old unharmed, in the backseat. And they were able to successfully reunite the child with his mother.”
Chief Morse said the child’s mother went inside the gas station and left the boy in the back seat. “She was inside the store for less than a minute, and she had left the truck running with her son in the back seat and somebody else in the parking lot jumped in the truck and took off with it,” he explained.
The suspect abandoned the truck less than a mile away from the original scene. Officers continue searching for that suspect. “We have several videos we’re combing through from the store and using all of our resources — license plate readers, crime cameras, and our drone unit to try to locate the suspect, or suspects, that were in other vehicles, who were involved in the taking of this truck,” the chief said.
“We’re just very thankful right now that it appears the suspect took the truck and then abandoned it a short distance later,” Chief Morse said. “When they realized that there was a child in the backseat, they did the right thing and just left the truck running. So they probably didn’t know there was a child in the back.”
Chief Morse said BRPD’s Fourth District is “extremely understaffed” right now. “They have, I think, seven officers on the streets for the entire district,” he said. “So we put an all-call out to the entire city. All districts sent people up there. We emptied out all of our detective divisions, our operations personnel. Everybody was in the area looking. Ultimately, one of those detectives just driving through the area was able to spot the truck.”
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