A gas station clerk in Detroit is being hailed a hero after he risked his life confronting a suspected kidnapper who came into his store. It all began at around 7:00 a.m. on Monday, April 13, in Hamtramck, Michigan, when a 16-year-old girl was approached by the suspect at a bus stop while waiting for her ride to school. The suspect pointed a gun at her and demanded she get in his car.
Thirty minutes after the abduction, the man took the girl into a gas station in nearby Detroit and forced her to buy him a pack of cigarettes. The gas station cashier thought the situation looked suspicious, a hunch that the girl confirmed. “When he asked her to pay for the cigarette, I said, ‘Stop. There’s something wrong.’ And she mouthed, like talked to me like with no sound, ‘Help,’” Abdulrahman Abohatem told WXYZ.
Abohatem put his life on the line to help the abducted girl
Abohatem asked the girl to come around the counter and get behind him. He walked outside the bulletproof glass, told the suspect to leave the store, and followed him out just as the police rolled up to the gas station. “I see the police outside. I point to him—’That’s the guy,’” Abohatem recalled.
The police were at the right place at the right time because they had been tracing the girl using her smartphone. After word spread of the abduction, a friend of the girl was able to track her location.
Gas station footage shows Abohatem following the suspect out of the store as the police pulled up to detain him.
“One of her friends opened the location through one of the social media apps. I said, ‘Oh, I could see her location right now,’” Mohammed Alsanai, the principal at the girl’s school, Frontier International Academy, told ABC News. “As we show the police the location, informed the dispatch, and as she walked in and said she had the location, like the whole room froze, and we all look at each other like, ‘Here we go.’”
Amazing things can happen when people work together
It’s incredible that the girl was saved just 30 minutes after being abducted by a group of quick-thinking people working together—although some of them didn’t know it). It was a great piece of teamwork from the girls’ friends, school administrators, the police, and a quick-thinking clerk who trusted his gut and took a big risk to do what was right. The suspect was armed, so he could have easily been shot for confronting the man.
The entire situation is a great reminder that people of all ages and walks of life are willing to step up and do what’s right when someone’s life is on the line.
“It is very concerning because we’re talking about a child’s life here,” Hamtramck Police Chief Hussein Farhat said during an April 13 press conference. “It’s scary to [the victim’s family]. It’s scary to every parent who has children. So, we can only imagine what’s going through their head right now. Just want to make sure they know we’re there for them.”
