A man washing his SUV at a Kwik Trip in Oak Creek stepped away for less than two minutes, and in that window a stranger jumped behind the wheel and drove off with his two young daughters still in the backseat. Eight-year-old Charley refused to abandon her two-year-old sister Autumn, and instead grabbed her father’s phone from the center console and called her mother, saying simply, “Mom, I need you. We lost Dad.”
According to Upworthy, Adam Jorgenson had left the SUV running while he stepped out to dry it down, and reported the vehicle was taken roughly 90 seconds later. A man approached him and asked for directions, distracting him just long enough for a second man to slide into the driver’s seat and speed off with Charley and Autumn still inside. Jorgenson said the tires screeched as the SUV raced out of the parking lot before he called his wife, Brittany, and 911.
Charley later told her mother she had planned all along to grab the phone and call the moment the driver left the car. When the carjacker noticed the girls in the backseat and ordered Charley to get out, she refused to leave without her little sister, a detail Upworthy’s report frames as central to how the ordeal unfolded. Brittany, meanwhile, stayed on the line with her daughter, tracking the SUV’s location through Find My even as she said she feared she might never see her children again.
A Stalled Escape Ends the Ordeal Quickly
The SUV relied on a push-to-start ignition, and Jorgenson had kept the key fob in his pocket the entire time. About a mile down the road, the engine cut out, and the carjacker left the vehicle and ran on foot. Oak Creek police located the abandoned SUV near a Batteries Plus store close to South 26th Street and West Ramsey Avenue, according to FOX6 News Milwaukee…