A pizza shop employee came to the rescue of an abducted seven-year-old boy this week, after identifying his captor’s car from a message sent out by the Amber Alert service.
Courtney Best usually takes her cigarette break from Papa Murphy’s outside the back of the restaurant, but luckily for the family involved here, she decided to go out front for her break on Thursday.
It was while she was standing outside that she witnessed a white Dodge Avenger pulling into the carpark. Shortly after, she looked down at her phone and found an Amber Alert message detailing the kidnap of young Nicolas Gomez – who had been taken by a man - allegedly his mother's boyfriend - driving a white Dodge Avenger.
“I was like, ‘Nah, that’s not him’. The man was walking across the parking lot and looking at me…because I was the only person out here, with the little boy, and the little boy looked scared, and I was like, ‘No, that’s not him,’” she recalled.
However, Best decided to double-check. So, when she saw the man walk into a nearby store with the child, she got into her own car and drove past the Dodge Avenger – only to realise that the registration was the same one sent out over the Amber Alert messaging service.
Best immediately called the police. Although the abductor and the child were, by then, driving away, Best was able to inform police of their location, and the man was arrested shortly after. Thankfully, Nicolas was then reunited with his family.
