At first, Ashley Lingle didn’t register that the screaming outside of Happy Juice, her Vancouver espresso and smoothie cart, was coming from her husband, John.
By the time she realized something was wrong Saturday morning, the couple’s car and their 1-month-old baby inside it were missing. “I thought I was never going to see my son again,” she said.
Lingle’s husband had just unhitched the cart from a truck used to haul it as Lingle got ready for business in the parking lot of Bob’s Paint Land on Northeast 99th Street. He was standing just feet from the passenger side of the couple’s 2022 Audi, which operates with a push-button ignition. That’s when a stranger jumped in the driver’s seat — with the keys and Lingle’s wallet inside — and drove off with their 1-month-old son, Reece.
It’s at least the third time in the past year that Portland-area parents have reported their car stolen with a child inside. As in the other two cases, Lingle and her child were safely reunited. Washington deputies found the car within 15 minutes, the parents said, and hours later police arrested the man suspected of stealing it.
Back at the parking lot, the driver ignored the dad’s pleas to give up the child. He jumped a curb in the Audi and headed into oncoming traffic around 7:45 a.m., the boy’s father said. The dad called police as he ran down the street after the car.
Clark County Sheriff’s deputies found the baby and the car half a mile away, according to a news release Saturday. Paramedics who evaluated Reece found him unharmed. Lingle, though, was still overwhelmed.
“I remember holding him, and it didn’t feel real,” Lingle said. “It’s not something you ever think you’re going to experience – the idea of losing something you thought you’d have forever.”
Deputies briefly detained a man they thought stole the car but later realized he was the wrong person. That meant the suspected kidnapper was still at large, the parents realized.
“It became really eerie,” Lingle said. “It became nerve-wracking that this person was still out there and they knew where we were. They had our keys, they knew where we lived, it just felt really unsafe that they could possibly come back.”
Then Lingle and her husband discovered their credit cards were being charged at stores in the Vancouver Mall. So they decided to follow the trail.
The couple called police again, then called Foot Locker where their card had been charged. They wanted to know which direction the man had headed. They sped to the mall. Lingle and her husband found the man inside JCPenny with their keys and Lingle’s coin wallet, they said. The boy’s father tackled the man police later identified as Mario Andrews, and bystanders helped detain him until police arrived, the pair said.
Law enforcement arrested Andrews on suspicion of kidnapping, vehicle theft and reckless endangerment. Clark County court records show Andrews was sentenced to prison in 2022 on a previous charge of car theft.
This isn’t the first time in the Portland area someone has stolen a car with a child inside feet from a watchful parent.
In September, Portland police sent out an Amber Alert after someone stole a Honda with a 7-year-old inside from the parking lot of a U-Haul lot as her parents quickly returned the keys to a moving van. The girl was found safe in the abandoned car and, according to police, slept through the entire incident.
In October, 25-year-old Marcus Paul was convicted of second-degree kidnapping after he stole a minivan with a 9-month-old inside in Tualatin. The child’s father had been standing about 30 feet away, he told The Oregonian/OregonLive. A woman found the baby 30 minutes later abandoned on the ground near Barclay Park in Oregon City.
Lingle and her husband have faced online criticism from people who wrongly assume they left their child unattended. The whole scenario happened in seconds, Lingle emphasized on Sunday.
“As a new parent, we’re told that we’re hypersensitive or we always see worst-case scenarios,” Lingle said. “If you think you need to be overprotective, then definitely take those extra steps and love your little ones a little extra because you don’t really know when the last time is going to be the last time.”
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Sami Edge covers higher education for The Oregonian. You can reach her at sedge@oregonian.com or (503) 260-3430.
