It can be easy to forget things during the hustle and bustle of the holiday season.
We’re frazzled, we’re on our last nerve, and we’re rushing around at breakneck speed to try and accomplish everything in a very short period of time.
Most of the things that slip through the cracks are ultimately trivial. We decide not to actually attend a party after all, we forget a gift for someone who awkwardly shows up with a gift for us, and so on.
D’Anna Williams forgot a relatively minor thing. She forgot to lock her front door.
But that small omission soon turned into a much bigger problem that brought her to her wits’ end.
Williams had tucked her six-month-old son, Aniken, into his car seat. It was Christmas Day.
She’d gotten him situated, and then she remembered she’d forgotten to lock the front door.
No big deal: the car was at the curb and the front door was only a few steps away. So she ran up the stairs to lock her door, and that’s when she heard a terrifying sound.
Her car door closing. Someone had jumped inside her waiting car.
And then he took off. Williams ran down the street after the car in desperation, watching it slowly disappear from view.
“It replays in my head over and over,” she said, “it is on repeat right now and all I can hear is the tire screeching and seeing the back of my car.”
There was nothing she could do at that point but call the police. They were there quickly, but the man was long gone.
It was at that point that someone else was receiving a Christmas delivery they were not expecting. The Rosener family heard a knock at the door and opened it to find a baby out in the cold.
Laura Rosener later posted about this episode on Facebook, starting her recounting with “SOMEONE LEFT A BABY ON OUR DOORSTEP THIS MORNING.”
They called police immediately, and Williams was able to identify the child as her son. The man who stole the car was later identified as a 16-year-old who is now not only charged with theft, but kidnapping and endangering a child.
As Rosener concluded her story on Facebook, she highlighted sentiments we all share: “Thank God they didn’t leave the baby on the street, thank God they left it with us and not someone who would hurt or sell it, thank God we were home.”