WASHINGTON D.C. – According to reports, the culture of lawlessness that is permeating Washington D.C. is apparently now bleeding out into the surrounding counties, as two 15 year-olds hailing from the nation’s capital have been charged with carjacking a vehicle from a gas station in Maryland that had a two year-old child buckled in the back seat at the time.
The Montgomery County Department of Police released surveillance video Monday that had captured the incident that originally took place on June 16. In the video, a female driver can be seen parking her vehicle at a gas station located in the 8600 block of Georgia Avenue in Silver Spring; she gets out, walks around to the passenger side to insert money into a vacuum that she intended to use on her vehicle’s interior.
While she was doing that, one of the teen suspects is seen sneaking over to the driver’s side door before opening it, jumping in, and speeding away, with the victim’s two-year-old daughter still in a car seat in the back of the vehicle.
An person who witnessed the carjacking followed the suspect as he sped away, where they observed the teen pull over on Colesville Road to pick up a second suspect. The suspects then abandoned the stolen vehicle further down the road, leaving the child inside, unhurt.
Police later located two individuals matching the description of the suspects in downtown Silver Spring and, after a brief foot chase, placed them both under arrest. The two suspects, both 15-years old, from Northeast, Washington, D.C., have been charged with auto theft and kidnapping. Because they are both juveniles, the identities of the suspects have not been released to the media.
Washington D.C. and its immediate surrounding areas have been plagued recently by a huge surge in the number of violent car thefts carried out there, with many of them perpetrated by teens and even children. A recent study reported that there were 207 carjackings in D.C. between January and April of 2021; in contrast, the same time period in 2020 only saw 60.
Many of the carjackings in D.C. are violent in nature, and lives have been lost; one of the most infamous cases took place in March, when two girls – aged 13 and 15 – were arrested after they brutally killed an Uber Eats driver while in the process of stealing his car.
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