SAN JOSE — A San Jose construction worker’s superhero-inspired instincts led to the rescue of a 1-year-old boy kidnapped during a car theft, when the worker spotted the child, sensed something amiss and pulled the infant to safety, car seat and all.
The quick thinking ensured that the boy was back safe at his Soledad home just hours after the theft of the still-running car he was strapped into. His father had gone into his house Monday morning to hurriedly grab something, and returned to find his car — and son — gone.
The whirlwind kidnapping ended in dramatic fashion when suspect Raymond Randy Gutierrez stopped 90 miles north in San Jose and reportedly tried to convince a couple to take the boy. Instead, Colin Blevin whisked the boy out of the car and called 911.
“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.”
The suspected kidnapper was arrested in Salinas a few hours later after he decided to return to Monterey County.
The strange episode began just before 5 a.m., as the baby was sitting in the car on a Soledad driveway when the child’s father darted back into his house to retrieve a forgotten lunch, leaving the 1992 Honda Accord running. It was gone by the time he re-emerged, and soon after an Amber Alert was sent out at the request of Soledad police.
Blevin, who had not heard about the alert, was arriving at work around 7 a.m. to Ciarra Construction on Walnut Street in San Jose when he saw the Accord blocking the entrance to the corps yard. He got out to tell the driver to move and spotted a baby in a car seat in the back of the vehicle.
The driver, who had been muttering to himself and seemed out of sorts, complied with Blevin’s request. As Blevin pulled out in his work truck, he also noticed a man and woman standing nearby. The couple, who lived in an RV, were awakened by the driver knocking on their door, apparently trying to leave the baby with them.
“I recognized him as someone who could cause a lot of trouble,” Mamas Ramirez, the RV resident, told ABC7.
At one point during the encounter, Blevin said the man was blatantly “breaking into another car right in front of us,” in an apparent attempt to secure another vehicle.
Blevin said Ramirez, widened her eyes at him and quietly said, “Help me save this baby.”
So the 44-year-old Santa Clara resident asked the man if the baby belonged to him and the man replied with a rambling account of how a woman let him borrow the Honda and that the baby was hers.
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.”
When San Jose police arrived, they realized that they were dealing with the baby taken from Soledad. It was news to Blevin.
“Then I find out I helped save an Amber Alert baby,” he said. “I was in the right place to help.”
Soledad police later confirmed that Gutierrez, 43, a transient with addresses in both Soledad and San Jose, was arrested later Monday morning by Salinas police who spotted the Honda. Gutierrez, who also went by the nickname “Turtle,” was expected to be booked into Monterey County jail.
After being reunited with his family at San Jose police headquarters, the baby boy was back in Soledad by noon.
Wasson, the Soledad deputy chief, said the episode serves as another reminder of how dangerous it is to leave a running car unattended, no matter how briefly. He recalled how last year, a 2-year-old Soledad child was abducted in almost the exact circumstances.
“This is 100 percent preventable. This baby was taken 100 miles away from home by a stranger, and it could have turned out absolutely ugly,” Wasson said. “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.”
