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Car Towed Away While Boy with Down Syndrome in Backseat, Tow Driver Leaves Boy on Street

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It’s a busy Friday evening in the city. You need to just pop in and pop out of a place really quickly, but there are no parking spaces open.

You know there’s always the chance of getting towed if you pick an obvious makeshift parking space — but you really won’t be more than a few minutes and circling in hopes of finding a spot will take time you don’t have.

Jon Ramzan’s solution to this problem was to park on a curb near a parking lot. A pizza delivery man working for Papa John’s in Glendale Heights, Illinois, he just needed to get in, make his delivery, and get out.

He also had his 11-year-old son Faraz with him, so he gave the boy his phone and said he’d be back shortly. This Friday afternoon pizza run to the Mosque was just part of his routine.

“My son was sitting back and I give him the phone,” Ramzan later said, according to WLS-TV. “I go, ‘Stay here and I’ll be two minutes.'”

But two minutes was time enough for a tow truck driver to see the car and make his move. Fortunately for everyone except the tow truck driver, witnesses saw the entire thing.

One man, Iqbal Ahmad, saw the driver speeding to tow the car and was surprised by how fast he was going.

“I saw that the tow truck, at lightning speed, coming in reverse, basically hooked up this car. I ran to the driver’s side and bang on the window and yell there’s a kid in that car,” he said.



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Another man took action as well, going to a nearby police officer to report the situation. “He took off from the parking lot,” Mohammed Safder said. “All of a sudden I saw the kid in the back, so I turned to the police officer who was there. I told him, ‘Looks like there’s a kid inside the car. He is towing the car.'”

Faraz, who has Down syndrome and is non-verbal, did everything he could to alert people to his presence and was “trying to scream and wave,” according to witnesses. Since his dad had handed him the phone, he was able to text his mother for help.

When she called, all she could hear was her son crying and the voice of a strange man yelling at her son.

“Because when she called, he knows it’s his mom on the phone,” Ramzan said. “He was crying. He could not say anything and the guy was yelling, ‘Get out of the car, get out of the car and stand over there!'”



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Apparently, the driver drove a few blocks, pulled into a bank parking lot, and told the kid to get out. He then left the boy there by himself and drove off with the car.

A good Samaritan saw the 11-year-old dumped on the road and went over, keeping him safe until he could be reunited with his family.

The driver of the tow truck was eventually identified and arrested for reckless conduct and endangerment of a child, but the case isn’t over yet.

When the tow truck company was asked about the incident, they questioned the situation and leveled a finger at Ramzan: “If in fact there was a child left in the car and no one was around, why was the father who left the child in the car not charged with child endangerment?”

For now, though, the boy is safe and back with his family. Thankfully no one was hurt.

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