Dad Victor Ruiz of Houston, Texas was arrested last week after his car was towed from a no parking zone — with his two young daughters inside! The incident occurred at Ruiz’s apartment complex where he had parked illegally and left his daughters in the back seat as he unloaded groceries. According to eyewitness Sade Jones, a tow truck driver pulled into the apartment complex, hooked up the car, snapped a photo of where it was parked, and drove off quickly even though she says she was yelling at him, “Wait, wait wait! The kids in the car!”
Sade says Ruiz came running back out and he and a group of neighbors tried to catch the tow truck but couldn’t. According to the police report, the tow truck driver stopped two miles away and that’s when he realized their were two children in the vehicle. Sade says he should have realized sooner, iterating that she “kept screaming, telling him ‘them kids in there!'”
Here’s the video report from Local 2 about the incident:
News anchor Dominique Sachse (on whom I now have a serious name crush — and regular crush) asked on-location reporter Ryan Korsgard the million dollar question: “So Ryan, help me with something. If I’m unloading groceries from my car, it probably takes a minute before I’ve got to go back and get more groceries in the car. How long was the dad inside the apartment with the kids in the car for the tow truck driver to even show up?”
Ryan replied, “Well, his neighbors say not very long at all, and they say that they told that tow truck driver, they yelled at him and said, ‘there are children inside that car.’ They say he took off very quickly.”
Victor Ruiz was charged with two counts of abandoning a child and at the time of the video report was still in jail being held on $4,000 bond. Neighbor and eyewitness Sade asks, “How did he abandon a child if a whole bunch of people was around watching his car?”
There is no indication that the tow truck driver has been charged with anything. (Even if the tow truck driver didn’t break any laws, isn’t there some sort of job requirement that says you should check for children and/or pets?)
And just in case the clip above doesn’t work (I had issues when doing the post, perhaps because of the high traffic) here’s the AOL version, which has edited out the intro and outro:
