GREENPORT, NY — A good Samaritan wasted no time helping a frantic grandmother on Long Island’s East End.
Police say a carjacker with a criminal record took off in his car with his young grandson strapped into the back seat.
What happened next looks like a scene from a movie.
“And I hear somebody screaming,” Bill Gorga said.
Gorga was sitting in his pickup truck when a frantic grandmother ran out of an East End North Fork store.
“‘What’s going on? What’s going on?’ “That car just left with my baby in it,” she recalled.
Across the ferry and the post office, the theater and the bakery, along Front Street in bucolic Greenport, a stranger sped away in a stolen luxury SUV. The victim’s 14-month-old grandson was asleep on his back.
“What? That’s not good,” Gorga said.
He told the grandmother to jump into his truck and the chase began.
“He went through Southold Town doing, like, 70 or 80,” Gorga said.
However, Gorga, a retired marine engineer from East Marion, remained calm.
“I say ‘Get your phone and start calling 911.’ She couldn’t do that. She was hysterical,” Gorga said.
Somehow he managed to box the carjacker on his shoulder.
“My hand is on the horn to alert people. He says, ‘Take your baby.’ He says, ‘I don’t want the baby,'” Gorga said.
When the grandmother got out of the pickup and put the baby in the car seat, she ended up in her SUV with the suspect speeding off.
“I’m like, ‘He’s got both.’ what have i done I wanted to cry at that point,” Gorga said.
For five miles, Gorga was in the queue. Finally, the thief let the grandmother and the baby go.
“They’re safe. They’re fine,” Gorga said.
The carjacker soon crashed into a guardrail, where Southold police handcuffed him.
The 55-year-old suspect had just been released from Yaphank prison five months ago. In that case he pleaded not guilty and ordered jail without bail. Her license was suspended and an order of protection was issued for the child and the grandmother.
“He probably thought he locked the vehicle with his fob, but it didn’t lock,” Southold Police Chief Martin Flatley said. “We never want to see a child unattended anywhere, especially in a vehicle.”
“I was just a guy who was in the right place at the right time,” Gorga said.
A humble Good Samaritan.
Already this year, Kids and Car Safety has documented 35 cases in the US where children were left alone in stolen vehicles.
