“Every second feels like hours”: Amazing moment a kidnapping is foiled
Terrifying bodycam footage has been released by US authorities of the moment police foiled the kidnapping of a six-year-old girl.
The video shows the moment when Jason Burba, an officer from the Louisville Metro Police Department, approached a red sedan after the suspect was in custody, opened the passenger door and found the child who had been snatched from her bike and thrown into the car.
After saying “hello”, the officer began to reassure the little girl.
“It’s OK,” he told her as he picked her up.
“Come here, it’s OK.”
Burba is then seen walking to a police vehicle while the child, who was not physically harmed, can be heard crying, “I want my daddy.”
During a police press conference, Burba, who is a father of four, admitted the cry went straight to his heart.
“It was tough,” Burba told WAVE 3 News while fighting back tears.
“You have kids.”
Burba’s sergeant, Joseff Keeling, is also a dad to a young child.
Both officers said they felt the same panic as any parent would if their child had been kidnapped.
Keeling said all police units stopped what they were doing when they received reports a man had pulled a child off her bike before throwing her in the back of his red vehicle by her collar.
Neighbours who had followed the car wrote down three of the digits on the licence plate and gave them to police.
“It’s like the world stops,” Burba said of the search.
“Like every second feels like hours.”
Keeling told radio station WHAS that he saw the car and followed it as it pulled into a driveway.
In Keeling’s bodycam footage, he can be seen pulling the vehicle over and ordering the driver to get out of the car with his hands up.
“When I approached the vehicle, I didn’t know what was going to be behind that door,” he told WAVE.
“The windows, the tint was so dark.”
Robby Wildt, 40, was arrested, charged with kidnapping a minor, and booked into Louisville Metro Corrections on a US $1 (AUD $1.34) million bond.
In an interview with WHAS, Keeling credited the witnesses for providing a good description of the car and recording part of the number plate.
Image: Louisville Metro Police Department