Carjacking Victim Was Locked in Car Trunk for 9 Hours

Police are searching for two men in an armed carjacking and kidnaping Wednesday morning at Cerritos Avenue and Moody Street.

The incident began when the victim, a 34-year old Los Alamitos man on his way to work, was in his car stopped at a red light, directly in front of a fire station.

“I was not really being observant,” said the man, who asked that his name not be published. “I was tuning my radio, and these two guys came out of nowhere. . . . One of them pointed a gun at me. The other pulled me out and put me on the floor of the back seat--and off we went.”

In the back seat, one of the assailants removed the man’s necktie and bound his hands behind his back. After about 40 minutes of driving, the assailants stopped the car briefly in a vacant lot in a commercial area, where they took the man’s money and jewelry and locked him in the trunk of his car.

For the next nine hours, they drove the car around, making several stops, while the man remained in the locked trunk.

“I thought I was going to die, plain and simple. Game over,” the victim recalled thinking. “My thoughts centered around my child. I did a lot of soul-searching. I’m going to start going to church on Sunday.”

At about 6.30 p.m., the assailants pulled into the parking lot of a Ralphs at Lincoln Street and Beach Boulevard. They pulled the man from the trunk and removed the necktie.

“They said, ‘Get . . . out of here,’ ” the man said. “I said I had no problem with that.”

As the car sped off, the man went to a pay telephone, where he used a credit card to place a call.

“I suppose most people would have called 911,” the man said. “I called my mother. She picked me up and we drove to the police station.”

The police said that the daylight kidnaping is unusual for Cypress.

“We haven’t had one like this before,” Sgt. Ray Peterson said, adding that “usually they just let the people go or do something horrible to them.”

Peterson said police are searching for the vehicle and the men.