SKOKIE -- Osial Hernandez, the 7-month-old child inside a van stolen from the Northwest Side has been found safe, police said.
Workmen in the area heard him crying and saw the infant inside the parked van. The baby did not appear to be harmed, but is at a local hospital, police said. He has been reunited with his family.
Chicago detectives this evening were still trying to determine why the van was taken from a parking lot outside a building where the boy’s mother had been working.
Osial was left sleeping in the van by his mother, Nuri Salgado, a newspaper distributor. She left him in the van with the engine running while she was bundling newspapers for delivery inside a warehouse on the 4200 block of West Bryn Mawr, police said.
At about 3:30 a.m., she came out of the Bryn Mawr Distribution Center to check on her son, who was wrapped in a blanket. He was OK, so she went back inside. When she returned shortly afterward, the van was gone, said Kelley Wilde, manager of the distribution center.
Meanwhile, before the call came into police, officers stopped the van near Bryn Mawr and Pulaski at 3:40 a.m. because its lights were turned off and it was in an area where a crime had occurred. Police said they did not receive a 911 call about the missing baby until 4:35 a.m.
At the ime of the traffic stop, officers were unaware the child was missing and did not know the van had been stolen, police said.
The officers were called off to respond to shots fired elsewhere and let the driver of the van go.
Wilde said there was a delay in reporting the stolen van — and the missing baby — because she and Osial’s mother had searched the area to see if someone had moved the vehicle.
Police said the driver of the van was between 35 and 45, clean-shaven, Hispanic and wearing dark pants and a beige blazer with a fur lining around the collar.
His father, Francisco Hernandez, said the baby was being breast-fed. Hernandez had been concerned that Osial went without food during the day.
E-Mail Story
Print Story
