Police say the family of 7-year-old Yamilet Martinez was dropping off a moving truck Sunday night when their car was stolen with Martinez inside.
Sgt. Kevin Allen, with the Portland Police Bureau, said the family had just moved to Vancouver and were dropping off the moving truck they had rented at a rental location near Southeast 49th Avenue and Powell Boulevard. According to police, the father of Martinez couldn't find the key drop box. She was sleeping in the backseat of the car her mother was driving and had parked along the street.
The mother got out to help her husband look for the drop box, when Allen says she noticed her phone's Bluetooth was disconnecting from the car. Allen says she turned around to see their car driving away, with Martinez still inside.
“She got out to go help him, was only away for a split second, and then all of a sudden, turns around and sees her car driving away,” Allen said.
Allen says the first call to 911 came in at around 6:50 p.m. All officers in the area were tied up, he said, but left their current cases to respond.
Eventually, around 50 officers had responded to aid in the search, including 10 detectives who, Allen says, came in on their day off.
Allen says they began a grid search near where the car had been stolen. He said they've seen these types of cases many times.
“This is surprisingly common. This isn’t a daily occurrence, but this does happen where we’ll get the call of a car stolen with a child inside," he said.
Allen says about an hour into the search detectives decided to issue an Amber Alert for Martinez. But it wasn't until 10:30 p.m. that the alert went out.
“They didn’t have a suspect description, which kind of complicated things. Normally, we have that when we put out an Amber Alert -- they’d been communicating with Oregon State Police, giving them the information we had, and at about 10:30 is when we got the approval to put out the Amber Alert,” Allen said.
We asked why it took so long for it to go out: "There’s sort of this misconception that the Amber Alert is just this button you push and instantly everything goes out. There’s a ton of work that goes into the process before that goes out," Allen said. "We have to be really careful about how we use Amber Alert for a couple reasons. One, we don’t want them to go out all the time and then people will stop paying attention to them. We want Amber Alert to be only for the most severe, dangerous cases."
Allen even went as far to say that three and a half hours from the initial call to Amber Alert is pretty good.
“So, honestly, I mean it was like three hours, and that’s a pretty quick turnaround for an Amber Alert. If you ask the Amber Alert people, they’ll tell you that’s not unusual at all,” he said.
KATU reached out to the Oregon State Police, who issue the alerts, but haven't heard back yet.
Then, about 10 minutes after the alert went out, officers doing the grid search found the stolen car near Laurelhurst Park, and Martinez still sleeping inside.
“She slept through the entire thing,” Allen said.
Allen said they got lots of tips from the community about the search, for which they're very grateful. But, he says, it's a good reminder that you can't leave your car running, unattended, even for a second.
“They were taking good care of this little girl by all accounts, and it still happened to them; it happened so fast. And so my message to people is, if you're gonna get out of your car, turn the car off, lock the doors, take the keys with you, don't assume that if you're nearby it won't happen. There are people out there, unfortunately, out there looking for that crime of opportunity, that moment where there's a car running with the key in it that they can just hop in and go," Allen said.