Something just didn’t seem right. We’ve all experienced that instinct before, but most of the time we just suppress it down and ignore it. When Colin Blevin saw a disoriented man with a baby in the back seat, however, something told him he had to act.
Sensing something just wasn’t right with the situation, he swiftly pulled the 1-year-old child – in his car seat – to safety. Blevin’s gut instincts were more right than even he could know.
Construction worker Colin Blevin with help from homeless woman rescue baby in San Jose after kidnapping in Soledad prompting #Amber Alert pic.twitter.com/3X0o30IVBH
— @Rob Fladeboe (@RFladeboe7) July 17, 2017
Just hours before, the baby’s father was getting ready to leave the house and put the child in the back seat. After realizing he’d forgotten something, he hopped out of the car to rush inside and get it. When he came back out, his car and baby were both gone.
Most of us parents have done that exact same move, and there’s always that moment when you return and think, ‘I hope they’re still there’ and of course they always are.
The man who stole the car and kidnapped the child was Raymond Randy Gutierrez. He took the car on a long ride heading north, about an hour and a half or so, and apparently had second thoughts about having a child in the car. He attempted to convince someone else to take the child.
It was at that moment that Blevin’s suspicions were confirmed, and he grabbed the boy and called police.
Because he was alert and paying attention – and listening to his gut – this baby is alive and back home. Here’s what Blevin told local news:
“My spider sense is going off … Something’s not right here,” said Blevin, referring to the comic-book hero Spider-Man’s superhuman intuition.
“This is one of the good feeling days, when things worked out right,” Soledad Deputy Chief Damon “Chuck” Wasson said. “The child is safe, and the parents get their baby back. This is a win for us.”
When the father of the baby realized the car was gone, he immediately called police, who then issued an Amber Alert. Blevin, however, had not even heard about the alert, making those ‘spider senses’ all the more chilling. He only even saw the baby because the man was blocking the way into the construction site where he worked. If the man hadn’t been blocking the way, Blevin would’ve just headed on in to work. Instead, he was forced to get out of his car and ask the man blocking the way to move.
That’s when he looked into the back seat and saw the baby. According to reports, the driver seemed “out of sorts” but nevertheless agreed to move his car. A couple living in a nearby RV were outside watching all of this unfold, and Gutierrez approached them and asked them to take the little baby.
Mamas Ramirez wasn’t interested, and instead headed over to Blevin. “Help me save this baby” she reportedly told him. They began interrogating the man, who responded by telling them a bizarre, nonsensical story. It wasn’t adding up, and Blevin decided it was time to act:
Blevin wasn’t buying it, noting that the baby was “content, with clean clothes, a nice car seat, and a bottle on his chest. This doesn’t jibe with this dirty, scruffy tweaker guy.”
Blevin, who has a 19-month-old daughter, decided the baby was not traveling any further with the man.
“I take the baby and I put him on my trailer, and I said, ‘I’m calling 911,’ ” he said. “The guy didn’t really seem to care. I think he realized he messed up. He was in for a stolen car, and he stole a baby. He stole a child.”
Police used the incident to caution people about the dangers of leaving a child in a running car, no matter where you are or what time of day it is. “There are people out there who will prey on you. The couple of seconds it took this dad to run into the house, it’s not worth it.”