Any parent will tell you that traveling with children is no vacation. Parents must be on high-alert at all times, wary of the risk of their kids wandering off on their own or, God forbid, someone attempting to snatch them away.
One traveling family saw their nightmares realized when a stranger they encountered during their travels attempted to abduct their children right in front of them.
A woman was captured on security footage at an Atlanta airport as she allegedly attempted to kidnap two young children who were traveling with their family to Disney World, People reported.
The incident took place at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport last week.
A young family was traveling from Atlanta to Florida to vacation at the Disney Land resort there. Security footage inside the airport shows the mother being approached by a stranger while she and her husband were walking with their children through the atrium.
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At the very beginning of the video, a woman can be seen standing motionless in the middle of the airport.
Dressed in black and white and wearing a large, pink floppy hat, the woman appears to be waiting for someone, only moving when she sees a young family with two strollers and a child attempting to walk past her.
The traveling mother becomes separated from her husband while she and the strange woman briefly interact.
Then, quite unexpectedly, the woman can be seen attempting to grab the stroller away from the mother, inside of which is a young child. As the mother fights off the attempted abduction, her husband, who has been watching the encounter, rushes over to help.
In an interview with police, the mother said that once she managed to get the stroller away from the woman, she then turned her attention to her toddler.
She said the woman grabbed for the family’s older child, who wasn’t inside a stroller, and attempted to “walk away with him.”
In the video, she can be seen snatching up the child into her arms in an effort to carry him away from his family.
However, the father was able to grab his child back just as a traffic control officer noticed what was happening.
When the officer rushes over to the group to help, the woman attempting the kidnapping runs away from the scene, but the officer pursues her and manages to catch up with her just a few feet away from the family.
Video shows the officer struggling to subdue the woman before more backup arrives.
The woman has now been identified as 26-year-old Esther Daniels. An Atlanta Police Department spokesperson said she was exhibiting “erratic behavior” upon her arrest.
“Her behavior was very erratic, but we can’t really speak on what her mental state was, but we can agree that what she did was very erratic and odd, to say the least,” Tashena Brown told WSB-TV .
Both children involved in the alleged attempted kidnapping were checked by emergency services and found to be uninjured.
Daniels was taken to a hospital “due to her mental state and some blood on her lower lip” before she was formally arrested and charged with kidnapping and obstructing an officer. As of right now she has not entered a plea and remains behind bars in Clayton County Jail without bond.
Brown said the responding traffic control officer deserves all the praise for thwarting the attempted kidnapping.
She is being hailed for her quick thinking as she pursued the fleeing Daniels.
Brown said the officer deserves recognition “especially for her to have been working, really, in a civilian capacity, for her to just to jump in right away with no hesitation, is amazing.”
h/t: People
