Girl in Stolen Car Found Unharmed : Crime: The 6-year-old knocked on a stranger’s apartment door after thieves ditched car. Police believe they abandoned vehicle ‘because they didn’t want any part of a kidnaping.’

A 6-year-old girl who was asleep on the back seat of her mother’s car when it was stolen in Inglewood early Wednesday morning was found unhurt seven hours later when she knocked on an apartment door in South-Central Los Angeles, authorities said.

Lenesha Lynn Thomas told the apartment residents, who fed her breakfast while she waited for police, that she awoke when two men in the car started laughing at her.

Inglewood police said they believe that the same two men earlier staged a “bump-and-rob” accident--driving another car that rear-ended one driven by the child’s mother, Katherine Toney, 26, then commandeering the car when she got out to check for damage.

The thieves apparently abandoned Toney’s car five miles away on West 75th Street when they saw the nightgown-clad girl in the back, Officer Calvin L. Smith said. “They got rid of the car because they didn’t want any part of a kidnaping,” he speculated.

Lenesha was reunited with her mother, grandmother and aunt at the Inglewood police station shortly after 8:30 a.m. Wednesday. When she saw the camera crews and reporters awaiting her arrival, she grabbed a police officer’s hand, then spotted her mother and ran to her with arms outstretched.

The child’s grandmother, Judy Wilson, said she spent the early morning hours anxiously waiting by the phone for word from police, while the mother and her boyfriend scoured area streets looking for Lenesha.

Residents of the apartment building at 127 W. 75th St. said they awoke about 7 a.m. to find a car blocking the driveway and a little girl playing outside. Most said they believed that the child’s parents were inside visiting someone.

“The car was pulled up in the yard, nice and neat,” said Melissa Hannibal, 25, who lives downstairs, closest to where the car was left. “I didn’t really think anything about it until I saw she was getting back in the car and she was crying.”

Lenesha climbed the long flight of stairs to ask resident Ella Wilson for help, Hannibal said. Wilson called police, then cooked the girl a breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon and grits while Hannibal brought her a red sweater and a pair of her 3-year-old son’s socks.

“She said, ‘I’ve been kidnaped.’ She was crying really hysterically,” Hannibal said. “Then she said, ‘I’m cold.’ ”

Police said Toney was driving through Inglewood just after midnight, returning home from taking her sister to the airport, when a black Nissan sedan pulled up and lightly hit Toney’s car from the rear near Century Boulevard and Van Ness Avenue. Toney followed the Nissan onto side streets until the car stopped. When she left her car to survey the damage, the passenger in the Nissan jumped in and drove it away, quickly followed by the Nissan.

Police have no suspects and only very general descriptions of the driver and passenger. Both were teen-agers, one of them had long, curly hair and acne scars and was wearing a black and white checkered shirt and black pants. Smith said investigators are trying to lift fingerprints from Toney’s car, which sustained minor damage.

When originally reported, the crime resembled a hoax pulled three weeks ago in which a woman reported her car stolen with her daughter inside. In that case, police discovered later that the woman had created the story about the child, probably to engender faster police action in locating the car.

“But as far as we can tell, this one is totally legitimate,” Smith said.

Lenesha was examined at the police station and found to be unhurt.