Boy, 2, Found in Car Seat Alongside I-5

Truck driver Miguel Gutierrez customarily keeps a sharp eye on the shoulder of the road during his daily trip hauling macaroni flour on the Golden State Freeway between Fresno and East Los Angeles.

“Sometimes I find things that people lost while they were traveling,” he said Tuesday, such as sleeping bags or suitcases blown off car roofs.

About 6:40 a.m. Tuesday, as Gutierrez rumbled northward on a cold and lonely stretch of road where the highway rises toward Tejon Pass above Castaic, he made a discovery that astounded him. He was talking into his citizens band radio mike and scanning the shoulder, he said, when suddenly, there it was:

“I saw real clear--a car seat and a little baby in there. I just threw my CB down and pulled over right away,” he said.

Sitting strapped in a child’s car seat on the left shoulder of the freeway near the Templin Highway exit, facing the autos and trucks that roared past only six feet away, was a 2-year-old boy.

“I thought maybe somebody is making a joke, maybe they put a doll in there,” said Gutierrez, who climbed out of his cab to investigate. “But when he looked at me, he started crying and he put his arms out. He still had the seat belt on.”

California Highway Patrol officers said that was lucky, because otherwise the toddler might have wandered into traffic on heavily traveled Interstate 5.

“How can people leave a 2-year-old boy in a place like that?” Gutierrez asked. “That’s not human.”

CHP Officer Rick Miler took the child into custody after Gutierrez, 35, brought the boy to his truck and phoned authorities from a roadside emergency call box.

“When I first got to him he was scared to death,” Miler said. “He was shaking, probably from the cold as much as from being scared.”

Miler said the boy may have sat along the windy, cold road for two hours before being discovered. “Anything longer and he would’ve been in bad shape,” said Miler, who feared hypothermia could have set in.

A Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department supervisor at the nearby Peter Pitchess jail estimated the temperature in the area at the time at 42 degrees.

The boy was identified by the CHP as Johnathon Thomas, and the saga of how he came to be sitting beside the road emerged from several police reports as the hours passed.

Los Angeles police said that the boy’s mother, Kindra Hughes, who lives in Carson, had gone to a post office near the Los Angeles International Airport. Unable to find a parking space, she entrusted her car, with the child inside, to a cousin, asking him to drive it around and pick her up.

The cousin, Reginald Blackwell, 18, whom Los Angeles police described as having a history of emotional problems, was later arrested by police in Bakersfield, 112 miles north of Los Angeles. Officers said he was breaking car windows in a motel parking lot, apparently after abandoning the child by the side of the freeway.

Miler said Blackwell was bragging about having killed a child when he was taken into custody.

The toddler, examined at Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital in Santa Clarita and found to be unhurt, was reunited with his mother at the CHP station there Tuesday afternoon, after charming Highway Patrol officers, who said they wanted to take him home for Christmas.

Blackwell, of Los Angeles, was being held in lieu of $50,000 bail in the Parker Center jail in Los Angeles on suspicion of child endangerment. Blackwell may face additional charges of auto theft in Los Angeles and vandalism in Bakersfield, said Lt. Anthony Alba, an LAPD spokesman.

Apparently the child’s mother had been unaware of her cousin’s emotional problems, which were reported later by Blackwell’s parents, Alba said.

Emerging from the post office to find her car, cousin and son gone, Hughes filed a missing persons report, Los Angeles police said.

Gutierrez, who hauls flour from Fresno to a plant in Los Angeles for the Costa Macaroni Manufacturing Co., said it was lucky that he drove along that stretch of the Golden State Freeway when he did; he was supposed to make his run later in the day.

“I really believe in God and I thank God for making me do everything that let me find this boy,” the truck driver said.

Gutierrez’s boss had told him to leave on the five-hour trip at 2 a.m. But Gutierrez, whose wife gave birth to their fourth child five days ago, said he left almost four hours early because he wanted to get home as early as possible.

Gutierrez said he usually travels that portion of roadway at about 55 mph, which probably would have been too fast for him to notice the child in the car seat. But as he headed home Tuesday morning, he had slowed down to 35 mph to allow another trucker to catch up with him.

Miler said Johnathon’s identity was quickly established through phone numbers written on a napkin stuffed in his jacket pocket.

Miler became the child’s primary caretaker, changing his diapers and feeding him until his mother arrived at the hospital in the afternoon. Another officer went home to get some of her own son’s clothes for the boy.

“I really took a liking to this kid,” said Miler, whose colleagues had started calling the mystery toddler “Chris”--short for Christmas.

“If we hadn’t found his parents, he was coming to my house for Christmas.”