A 7-year-old child was sleeping soundly inside a minivan early Thursday when the vehicle was towed to be repossessed.
According to WPVI, a 26-year-old mother left her daughter in the car around 2:30 a.m. while she ran into her Southwest Philadelphia workplace. The woman, who was not named, told police she was inside the Domino's pizzeria for no more than seven minutes.
During that time, tow truck operator and repo man Carmino Giannone arrived. He had been tracking the minivan and had the right to repossess the vehicle, WPVI reported.
But he didn’t know there was a sleeping child in the backseat.
“I was already pulling away, and everybody on the block started chasing after me,” Giannone said. “To get out of a hostile situation, I went around the corner, and everybody started screaming, ‘There’s a kid in the car, there’s a kid in the car.’”
According to NBC Philadelphia, the child was sleeping under a blanket in the back seat, and the van's windows were tinted.
Giannone, who said he gets yelled at all the time, said people yelled at him about the child, but he thought they were lying.
“The vehicle, to me, appeared unoccupied,” he said. “There’s two car seats in the second row that were empty that I could see from the mirror of my truck. I don’t have to get out of my truck to hook up a car.”
The woman called police, who stopped the tow truck 10 blocks away from the Domino’s.
The child, who was uninjured, slept through the incident.
Read more at NBC Philadelphia and WPVI.
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