On the day after sweeps ended and our news director, Rita Andolsen, treated the newsroom to ice cream cake because of our tremendous ratings results, breaking news continued with a flurry.....ratings or no ratings.
Late Thursday evening a call came over the scanner that a car had been taken from the area of Lamontier and there was a baby inside....
Believe it or not folks, this HAS happened before, many times.
Every time, we've been totally on top of it....Paul Thomas and company covered one of these in the area of E 55 and Woodland years ago.....where it was caught on tape.
You hate to hear the call, but got to run on it.
Dave Summers and truck operator/videographer Dan Medsker and Brian Johnson headed out to the scene.
Producer Amanda re-arranged her show to fit the 'breaking news' in should it be legit.
Though you should never go on the air with scanner information, it is quite valuable to the crews and reporters working in the field --a spring board so to speak for them to ask questions and check out locations.
As soon as new details came over the scanner I relayed them to the crews in the field.
Something was not right.
After about 20 or 25 minutes, the car had been found near Woodland and Woodhill BUT there was no baby inside.
That's usually never the case. What happens is the suspect or suspects realize there is a child inside and abandons the vehicle so they don't get pegged for kidnapping as well.
This case was just humming along too smoothly with information coming from family members, the grandfather saying there is a picture of the child in the visor above the driver's seat.....
Where is the child?
Literally one minute before air time, Dave called into the producer and said--yes the car had been stolen but there was never a child inside. The grandfather, who was taking care of the baby, made that up to get the Cleveland Police to the scene quicker.
Had this been real, we were way ahead of the competition......
Grandpa is in big trouble!
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