It’s every parent’s fear come to life: A six-year-old boy was nearly abducted from the Marine Park playground last weekend during a brief confrontation with a crazed adult.
The boy’s mother was reportedly just yards away from the child, who was on the swing set off Stuart Street, when the unidentified white male approached and asked the boy to help him search for his own son.
The boy happily complied and was walking off with the stranger when he heard his mother calling out to him.
The stranger grabbed the child, screaming “You’re my son!” before securing him in a baby swing and running off.
The entire ordeal took less than four minutes, said the mother, who spoke to his paper on condition of anonymity.
“He got himself out of the swing and came running to me with tears in his eyes,” she remembered. “I grabbed my son’s Razor scooter and went out looking for him, but I couldn’t find him.”
The child suffered a bruise on his arm, but was otherwise uninjured.
His mother said that she took her eyes off her son for just a minute to watch her two-year-old daughter go down a slide. When she turned back to the swings, she didn’t see him and started calling out his name.
That made all the difference, she explained, adding that she reported the incident to the 63rd Precinct and was assured that abductions in Marine Park were extremely rare.
This incident, however, is the second near-abduction to be reported in the area in the last two months.
On one afternoon in late June, a stranger tried to lure a boy into his car as the child left his friend’s house. The child didn’t take the bait and reported the incident to his parents, but they didn’t feel it was necessary to get police involved.
Deputy Inspector Frank Cangiarella, the commanding officer of the 63rd Precinct, did not return calls for comment about Saturday’s incident.
He reportedly increased patrols in the area following the first near abduction, explained City Councilmember Lew Fidler, who recently held a community forum where the incident was discussed.
“As a father of two now-grown children, I know how important it is to keep an eye on your kids,” he said. “We haven’t seen this trend in the neighborhood before, but if it continues we’ll be on it like white on rice.”
