Duy Hoang thought it was somebody's idea of a weird joke about 8:30 Wednesday night when he looked from his front door and saw someone driving off in his car -- with his 11-month-old son, Ayden, strapped in the back seat.
As he yelled and sprinted down the snowy street chasing his vehicle, and neighbors emerged to see what the commotion was about, he watched in helpless panic as the car turned left at the end of the block and disappeared into the darkness.
After 90 anguished minutes -- "It seemed like forever," he said -- Ayden was found crying and cold, but otherwise unharmed, about 7 miles away from their Magnolia Street home on St. Paul's East Side.
Laughing and playing in his parents' living room on Thursday morning, Ayden seemed to be wondering what all the fuss was about.
Hoang and his girlfriend, Crystal Schramm, Ayden's mother, were getting ready to do some Christmas shopping Wednesday night.
As Schramm was getting her shoes on, Hoang had just buckled Ayden in the car seat, and had returned to the house to get something he had forgotten -- a coupon, he thought, but his mind was still foggy Thursday after a long night. In the span of those few seconds, little Ayden was gone. It had happened so fast, he said.
"I was like, 'where did they come from?' They must have been watching me," Hoang said.
The neighborhood on the west side of Beaver Lake where he has lived for the past decade is quiet and safe, and he knows most of the neighbors.
