CHARLOTTE, NC – A 10-month-old girl is back home with her family after being abducted right in front of her mother Saturday.
The child’s mom had gone to her mailbox on Fawnbrook Lane around 3:30 in the afternoon after returning from a Babies “R” Us on South Boulevard, when she says a woman approached.
“Just popped up, popped out of nowhere… and she just started asking me a lot of questions,” the mother told WCCB.
She got suspicious when the woman started asking about her baby and claimed to be pregnant herself. “I told her I could have sworn that I’d seen her at Babies “R” Us. She kept insisting that no, she didn’t see me,” she explains.
“My heart started beating. I thought something was not right. She wanted to hold my daughter. My daughter insisted. She stretched out her hand. So did she,” the mother explains.
When she handed over the baby, the woman took off with the child, running to a car parked a few houses down.
Neighbors noticed commotion. “She was leaping in to the car. Like “Oh my God! Give me my kid!” says Heather Drayton.
Drayton says the girl’s mother did everything she could to keep the car from leaving. “And she was like, hanging on, the lady was like driving with her, hanging off the car and dragged her down the street,” Drayton says.
But neighbors say the suspect made a big mistake – dropping her cell phone at the scene.
Police arrested 22-year-old Sharlornai Reid a couple hours later in a Walmart parking lot 10 miles away on Wilkinson Boulevard. The girl wasn’t hurt. Her mom is thankful.
“I couldn’t stop crying. And the first thing I did was go up to her, just held her, hugged her. Looked all over her body if she was OK. And she was perfect,” her mom says.
