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Surveillance technology helps police find abducted woman

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ASSOCIATED PRESS
Family members surround Keisha Gaither, second from left, mother of kidnapping victim Carlesha Freeland-Gaither, as they celebrate following a news conference in Philadelphia on Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2014, where investigators announced the woman seen on a surveillance video being abducted by a man off a Philadelphia street has been found safe outside Baltimore. Carlesha Freeland-Gaither was found in Jessup, Maryland, and the man who took her was arrested, police said Wednesday. (AP Photo/ Joseph Kaczmarek)

PHILADELPHIA >> A woman snatched off the streets of Philadelphia was rescued with the help of a GPS device that had been installed on the suspect’s car by the dealer in case the vehicle needed to be repossessed.

Carlesha Freeland-Gaither, 22, was resting at her mother’s home Thursday after a three-day ordeal that ended in Jessup, Maryland, on Wednesday when federal agents surrounded the car and took her alleged abductor into custody.

Delvin Barnes, 37, was being held at a jail in suburban Baltimore County on unrelated charges that he abducted and attempted to kill a 16-year-old Virginia girl.

Law enforcement officials got their big break in the Philadelphia case when they read the used-car dealer’s name on a traffic-camera image of Barnes’ car and asked the dealership to turn on the GPS unit, said Capt. Jayson Crawley of the Charles City County Sheriff’s Office in Virginia.

He said the dealership sells to customers with poor credit and routinely puts GPS devices on its vehicles so they can be easily located and repossessed if the owners fall behind on the payments.

“We called the dealership and within five minutes they had the location,” Crawley said.

It was the just latest arrest made possible by the surveillance technology that seems everywhere nowadays.

Freeland-Gaither had been seen on surveillance video being grabbed by a man and pulled toward a car Sunday night as she struggled to get away in Philadelphia’s Germantown neighborhood.

In the days afterward, police and federal authorities released a stream of images from surveillance cameras in Maryland and from a Philadelphia supermarket.

Police did not reveal a motive for the kidnapping.

Barnes has a long and violent criminal history, serving eight years in prison for a 2005 assault on his estranged wife in Philadelphia.

He is also charged with abducting a teenage girl in Richmond, Virginia, last month. The girl told police she was hit in the head with a shovel, put in the trunk of a car and taken to Barnes’ home.

Barnes later brought the girl outside, doused her with gasoline, asked her how she wanted to die and began digging a hole, according to Crawley. She managed to escape and made it to a nearby business.

A Maryland judge ordered Barnes sent to Virginia following a hearing at which the suspect, appearing by video, answered the judge’s questions with “Yes, sir” and “No, sir.” He did not have an attorney with him.

No immediate charges were filed in the Philadelphia case.

Agents with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents found his vehicle, its rear window kicked out, on a road in Jessup, with Barnes and Freeland-Gaither inside. A witness to her abduction had said she kicked out some of the car’s windows before it sped off.

Agents used their cars to box the vehicle in, then freed Freeland-Gaither, said Tim Jones, ATF agent in charge in Lanham, Maryland. She was taken to a hospital.

Her mother, Keisha Gaither, thanked police and the community for their support. She said she had talked to her distraught daughter by phone.

“She was very upset. She was crying. She just was asking for me, to tell me she loved me, she missed me, to come get her,” she said.

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O’Dell contributed from Charles City, Virginia. Associated Press writers Michael R. Sisak, Natalie Pompilio and Ron Todt in Philadelphia and Kasey Jones and Juliet Linderman in Baltimore contributed to this story.

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