True story of Oregon car thief scolding mother shared with photos from different crime

A rumor that circulated online in October 2025 claimed an Oregon man stole a car, noticed a baby in the back seat and turned the vehicle around to return the child safely. According to the story, upon returning to the scene of the crime, the car thief scolded the baby’s mother for leaving the child alone, then drove off again.

For example, on Oct. 10, Threads user @viewsaddict posted (archived) two surveillance photos. The first picture shows a man carrying a baby in a car seat. The second photo shows the same man having placed the infant carrier on the floor inside a building, resembling the interior of a gas station, and relaying a message to someone out of frame. The post, which received more than 15 million views, displayed a text caption reading, “In Oregon a man stole a car, but when he saw there a baby inside he stopped, returned the baby safely to the parents and scolded them for leaving him alone. Then he got back into the car and drove away again.”

(@viewsaddict/Threads)

In a second popular example, the HipHop Wave Facebook page shared a post (archived) telling the story with the same pictures.

(HipHop Wave/Facebook)

Users also shared this rumor in October 2025 with photos of the same man on Facebook (archived), Instagram (archived), LinkedIn, Threads (archived), TikTok (archived), X (archived) and YouTube (archived). Other users previously posted the same story, albeit with different text, as far back as 2023.

In short, Snopes found this rumor blended two different stories into one. The rumor’s text told a partially true story from 2021 in which Beaverton, Oregon, police said a car thief discovered a 4-year-old child — not a baby — sitting in a booster seat behind him, turned the vehicle around and scolded the mother for leaving the child in the car. (Threads user @viewsaddict’s original post mentioned the child as a baby, with a reply (archived) also referencing the child as a “4-year-old child” — a discrepancy apparently unnoticed by the user.)

The photos originated from a similar, but unrelated, crime in Palm Beach County, Florida, in 2018. In that incident, a different man stole a car from a RaceWay gas station in West Palm Beach, noticed a baby in the back seat and then dropped off the baby at a Sunoco gas station several miles west — the moment visible in the surveillance pictures users shared.

We requested the original police records regarding the two incidents from the cities of Beaverton and West Palm Beach, as well as from Palm Beach County, and will update this article if we learn further details.

True story of Oregon car thief scolding mother

On Jan. 16, 2021, The Oregonian newspaper reported a story with the headline “Thief threatens to call police on mom who left child in the back seat of the car he stole.” The story began, “A car thief who discovered a small child in the backseat of the SUV he boosted Saturday in Beaverton drove back to the child’s mother, demanded she take the child out of the backseat and drove off once more, police say.”

The report cited Matt Henderson, a Beaverton police spokesman, who said of the thief, “He actually lectured the mother for leaving the child in the car and threatened to call the police on her.” We contacted Beaverton police to request records and further information from Henderson. The story said:

The crime occurred at 9:10 a.m. in the parking lot of Basics Meat Market, 11900 S.W. Canyon Rd. The mother parked just outside the store’s front door and went inside to buy a gallon of milk and some meat, Henderson said. She was never more than 15 feet from the car, but she made a critical error.

She left the engine running and the doors unlocked.

Henderson noted, “What she did was not a crime. She was within sight and sound of her child.” He also added, “But she left the car running, so take that extra step, take the keys with you. It’s a good reminder to take extra precaution when we have our little ones with us.”

The article said police described the thief as “a man in his 20s or 30s who has dark brown or black braided hair and was wearing a multi-colored face mask.” CNN, People.com and other news media outlets also reported the thief as being a white male — not a Black man as seen in users’ posts sharing the story with the unrelated surveillance-camera photos.

The Portland Fox affiliate KPTV broadcast a brief video featuring a phone interview with the mother.

The mother, becoming emotional, said she imagined “how terribly it could have ended” for her son:

As moms, we get really busy and we think we’re just running in for a second, and this is just a perfect example of just letting our guards down and how terribly it could have ended. So I’m thankful that he’s OK, and it was so stupid and I’ll never do that again. But, it’s that split-second decision that can just change everything.

Three days after the car theft, The Associated Press reported details of the same story, adding that the vehicle had been found hours later in Portland and that police had not yet located the thief. We did not find any further details regarding police locating a suspect.

True story of Florida car thief dropping off baby

On March 20, 2018, the West Palm Beach NBC affiliate WPTV reported a story with the headline “Vehicle with baby inside stolen at gas station in suburban West Palm Beach.” The story, citing detectives, said that earlier that day, a man stole a black Kia Rio from a RaceWay gas station location in West Palm Beach. Seated inside the car: a 5 1/2-month-old baby. The thief then dropped off the baby in a car seat in a Sunoco gas station several miles west of the RaceWay:

Surveillance video from the RaceWay shows the thief arrived in a white sport-utility vehicle around 3:24 a.m. The thief, who was wearing a white tank top, then walks to the Kia Rio, looks around, gets inside and drives away.

Minutes later, video shows the owner of the Kia Rio coming out of the RaceWay looking confused and searching for his vehicle. After noticing his vehicle is gone, the Kia Rio owner then goes back inside the store to get help.

After taking the Kia Rio, the thief is then seen pulling up to the Sunoco gas station on State Road 7 and Okeechobee Road in Royal Palm Beach.

He’s caught on surveillance video struggling for several minutes trying to get the baby’s car seat out of the car.  The man is then seen carrying the car seat to the entrance of the gas station. The baby was left at the gas station unharmed.

WKRG, the CBS affiliate for the Mobile, Alabama, and Pensacola, Florida, areas broadcast video from the same surveillance footage featured in social media posts. The reporter described the footage: “He signaled the clerk to call police, and places the baby on the gas station floor. The clerk, on the phone with 911, calmly takes the baby, who is unharmed.”

The day after the incident, the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office announced on X (archived) they had taken a suspect into custody.

WPTV reported in July 2018 that the suspect’s mother turned him in to police after identifying him in the surveillance footage, and that an affidavit said she had witnessed him “acting erratically.” The article said he pleaded guilty to the car theft and that a judge ordered him to spend 180 days in jail, 120 of which he had already served.

For further reading, we previously investigated a rumor claiming tech billionaire Elon Musk spotted a lost 5-year-old girl on a city bus, reunited her with her mother and bought their family a house.