At 2:50 p.m. today (Tuesday), Moraga Police received a report that a subject in a pickup truck attempted to entice two girls into his vehicle. The girls were walking on Camino Pablo, near Camino Pablo School, when the subject drove up to them and asked if they could come with him to help find his dog. The girls did an excellent job and quickly ran away and summoned help at the school.
The subject is described as a white male adult, 30-40 years old, short light colored hair, clean shaven, wearing a grey shirt and sunglasses. The vehicle is described as a white 2-door pickup with a lumber rack and a decal on the passenger door (there may also be one on the driver’s door, but the girls only saw the right side of the truck).
When the girls ran away, the truck drove off on Camino Pablo towards Canyon Road.
Anyone with information about this incident is asked to contact the Moraga Police Department at 925-284-5010.
Wasn’t there a similar attempt/suspect description a few years ago in Orinda near Glorietta? (Vianne Court, to be exact.)
A frightening thing that does occur from time to time. I don’t remember the Vianne ct case but I remember the one near CP where a couple of kids mistook a driver’s motion for them to cross the street as an attempt to get them into the car. Best to be cautious – we’ve seen too many of these here.
Nice work girls!!
Same thing happened to my niece two weeks ago in El Sobrante on the second day of school (De Anza High School). She described her potential kidnapper as being in a white truck as well. He stopped her at a corner where if he were to abduct her, no one would see. It was strategic and when we saw where, we got scared. The man complimented her on how pretty she looked, asked her if she needed a ride home, and asked her if she wanted to use the phone to call her dad. This is a thing and it is happening in our area. It’s very scary. We stopped letting her walk home from school. For our niece, it happened around around 3:00 p.m. Someone is consciously and systematically targeting our girls. My niece is 14 years old. She got out of it safely, but it could be very different. If you know friends in the area, let them know.
“The girls did an excellent job and quickly ran away and summoned help at the school.”
The girls (2 of them) did the right thing and are safe. That is paramount. A grade of “Excellent”, however, would apply if they took a single picture of the vehicle or driver from their omnipresent cameras on their phones. Not blaming them, but you are an easy grader. Now some poor schmuck in a white pickup is “suspicious” because the information is so tenuous.
Heaven help the guy in a white pickup who waves to the girls thinking: “Go ahead, cross the street now” and they read “Come, Come and get in my car!”
5:31 pm
Safety. Paramount. Yes. We have to say you’re a tough grader, however, as we live and breathe phones and cameras and technology and while we manage to capture things unimagined by the Speed Graphic “shooters” of the 1930s and 40s it is harder to get discernible photos than you might think – especially when you are 10 or whatever these girls were and you’re in a stress situation.
We would bet the last thing they were thinking was: “I’ve got to zoom in on that license plate so the police can track and make a case against this guy…”
So we’re settling for safety first with an admonition that not every white truck (there must be six parked in front of OSH answering that description right now) doesn’t always have a bad guy in it.
You are right, of course, that safety is PARAMOUNT. I, myself, wouldn’t have thought of a picture in the stress of the moment. I am 60+, but my kids take pictures of their dessert in ANY restaurant. P.s. Hope your tomatoes are better than mine this year. I must be sinning.
Hi. Totally whiffed on your “tomatoes” comment. We scratched our heads until we realized one of our founders is a wannabe farmer. He smiled, said “tomatoes good, peppers even better – one good thing about the heat.”
We guess that’s Gardener-Speak. We have no idea what it means but he said you would!