Carjacked student guides cops to the rescue

Four students kidnapped in a Sunday night carjacking in Atlanta were rescued by city and campus police after one of the students called police from the trunk of the moving car.

The carjacking victims and Atlanta police said the student tried several times to call Atlanta 911 but was put on hold. The city said later, however, that the 911 center had answered the student’s first call after four seconds but that the young man either didn’t know it or was unable to talk at that moment.

The student said he then dialed Morehouse College police and got an answer — a dispatcher named Karen Wells, who sent the police to a Wachovia bank branch where the carjackers were planning to use their victims’ ATM cards.

“It was like an angel had just answered my prayers,” the student said of Wells. (The AJC is not identifying the students at their request; although two suspects were arrested at the bank, a third remained at large Monday.)

Throughout his call to Morehouse, the student seemed remarkably calm, speaking in low tones and almost always referring to the dispatcher as “ma’am,” according to a tape of the call that Morehouse police released.

Morehouse College police Chief Vernon Worthy said the victims, three of them Morehouse students and the fourth a student at American InterContinental University, were in the Collegetown complex a block west of the Morehouse campus when they were carjacked at gunpoint.

The gunmen forced two of the students into the trunk of the Buick LaCrosse, while the other two victims remained in the back seat of the vehicle.

The student who was driving the Buick said the group was at a Chevron station when one of the gunmen “put a gun to my head, and when I turned around, he stuck his arm in and took the key out of the ignition.”

He said the gunman ordered him to remove his earrings and give them to him, and he initially resisted.

“He emptied the bullets to the gun, showed me the bullets, closed it back up, cocked the gun and said, ‘Give me the earrings,’” the student said. “From that point on, I gave him everything he wanted.”

Another student, sitting in the back seat, said, “I had guns pointed at me from both sides.”

The student who made the call to police said the gunmen demanded all their cell phones, but didn’t notice that in the process of being forced into the trunk, “I slipped my phone into my pants.”

“When I got into the trunk, I was calling 911 over and over but could never get through to 911. It just so happened I had saved the Morehouse police number in my phone and that’s how I got through to let them know where we were at.”

Interim Atlanta Police Chief George Turner said the student placed a total of four calls to 911.

On the second and third, he got a recorded message that aims to keep the caller on the line until an operator can pick up. Turner said the student waited about 15 seconds each time before hanging up.

During the fourth call, an operator answered within five seconds, Turner said, but as with the first call, that operator was unable to get a response from ther caller.

“We want to be able to answer all of them, no question,” Turner said. “We went back and looked at what happened. We’re not trying to cover up anything.”