Used-car GPS helps police find abducted woman

This undated photo provided by the Philadelphia Police Department shows Carlesha Freeland-Gaither. A bank card belonging to Freeland-Gaither, a woman abducted Sunday night from a Philadelphia street, was used Tuesday morning, Nov. 4, 2014 in Maryland, police said. This is a fresh lead in a case that quickly gained attention after police released black-and-white surveillance video showing the 22-year-old woman flailing in vain as a man rushed her along a sidewalk to a parked car. (AP Photo/Philadelphia Police Department)
This undated photo provided by the Philadelphia Police Department shows Carlesha Freeland-Gaither. A bank card belonging to Freeland-Gaither, a woman abducted Sunday night from a Philadelphia street, was used Tuesday morning, Nov. 4, 2014 in Maryland, police said. This is a fresh lead in a case that quickly gained attention after police released black-and-white surveillance video showing the 22-year-old woman flailing in vain as a man rushed her along a sidewalk to a parked car. (AP Photo/Philadelphia Police Department)

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — A woman snatched off the streets of Philadelphia was rescued with the help of a GPS device that had been installed on the suspect's car by the dealer in case the vehicle needed to be repossessed, authorities said Thursday.

It was just the latest arrest made possible by the surveillance technology that is seemingly everywhere nowadays. And it involved not just GPS but surveillance video, traffic-camera imagery and a left-behind cellphone.

Carlesha Freeland-Gaither, 22, was resting at her mother's home in Philadelphia after a three-day ordeal that ended in Jessup, Maryland, on Wednesday when federal agents surrounded the car and seized her alleged kidnapper.

Delvin Barnes, 37, was jailed on unrelated charges he abducted and attempted to kill a 16-year-old Virginia girl.

"My understanding is, even after she was in the car and bound, she continued to struggle with this guy," Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey told ABC. He added: "She's got a lot of fight in her."

Police did not disclose a motive for the kidnapping. Authorities said there was no indication the two knew each other.

Police Inspector James Kelly said Freeland-Gaither's family told police she is doing well but "needs some time and space to heal."

Her rescue came after law enforcement officials spotted the used-car dealer's name on a traffic-camera photo of Barnes' vehicle and asked the dealership to turn on the GPS, said sheriff's Capt. Jayson Crawley of Charles City County, Virginia.

"We called the dealership, and within five minutes they had the location," he said.

He said the dealership sells to customers with poor credit and routinely puts GPS devices on its cars so they can be easily located and repossessed if the owners fall behind on the payments.

GPS devices are commonly used by law enforcement authorities around the U.S. to track suspects and make arrests. But often those cases involve devices secretly planted by police.

Though aided by technology, the Philadelphia kidnapping investigation began in a decidedly old-fashioned way: with a witness who saw it happen Sunday night and immediately called police. Police quickly discovered the abduction had been caught on video.

Also, Freeland-Gaither left her cellphone behind, giving authorities a quick ID. "We believe she left it for us to find," said Detective James Sloan.

The surveillance video showed Freeland-Gaither being grabbed by a man and pulled toward a car as she struggled to get away in Philadelphia's Germantown neighborhood.

In the days afterward, police and federal authorities released a stream of images from surveillance cameras of a man using Freeland-Gaither's ATM card and walking through a gas station minimart in Maryland.

Barnes served eight years in prison for a 2005 assault on his estranged wife and her family in Philadelphia. Barnes beat and choked her, punched her mother in the face and hit her father in the head with a glass bowl, court records show.

He is also charged with abducting a teenage girl in Richmond, Virginia, last month. The girl told police she was hit in the head with a shovel, put in the trunk of a car and taken to Barnes' home.

Barnes then doused her with gasoline, asked her how she wanted to die and began digging a hole, according to Crawley. She managed to escape.

On Thursday, a Maryland judge ordered Barnes sent to Virginia following a hearing in which he answered yes-and-no questions and did not have an attorney with him.

No immediate charges were filed in the Philadelphia case.

Agents with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents found his vehicle, its rear window kicked out, on a road in Jessup, with Barnes and Freeland-Gaither inside. A witness to her abduction had said the young woman kicked out some of the car's windows before it sped off.

After her rescue, she was taken to a hospital but was soon reunited with her family.

"She was very upset. She was crying. She just was asking for me, to tell me she loved me, she missed me, to come get her," said her mother, Keisha Gaither.

Latest Stories

Latest Podcast

STARR Community Services International, Inc.