Hints Over Hidden Cell Phone Thwart Carjacking

A woman abducted by a carjacker thwarted the crime by secretly dialing 911 on her cell phone and then talking with the driver, dropping clues for the emergency dispatcher into the conversation.

Despite her terror, Esther Green remembered the cell phone in her 10-month-old daughter’s diaper bag as she and the baby were driven through this Atlanta suburb Monday in the back seat of her Mercedes-Benz.

Green, the wife of New York Jets football player Victor Green, left the phone hidden in the bag and tried to give the dispatcher clues about what happened and where she was.

“Please stop the car. Please. It’s not worth all this,” Green told the driver, according to a 911 recording released Wednesday. “You can have the car. You can have the car. Please let me get my baby out of the car. Please. Please.”

To describe their location for the dispatcher, Green asked the driver to let her out at landmarks along the way and gave hints on what direction the car was traveling.

“You’re making a left?” she said. “Why are you making a left?”

Another time, she said, “Make a right onto Highway 85.” The 911 tape reveals that dispatcher Holly Eason immediately relayed the information. “They’re making a right onto Highway 85,” Eason reported.

Green kept up her act even as police closed in. With sirens sounding in the background, Green, feigning surprise, told the driver: “Oh, my God! They want you to stop.”

The carjacking began as Green waited outside a store for a friend. When she crawled into the back seat to retrieve her daughter’s juice cup, a man jumped in and drove away with Green and the baby in the back. He soon stopped to pick up another man.

Green said that after she called 911, she had no idea if anyone was listening on the other end.

Eason said she initially assumed the call was about a domestic dispute. But when Green’s friend also called to report the crime, “we put two and two together and realized we had a carjacking-kidnapping situation going on.”

After hearing enough clues about the car’s location, Eason sent officers to intercept it in Riverdale.

Two men from Ohio, Stephen Eric Bonnett, 18, and David E. McDonald, 21, were charged with kidnapping and auto theft.