SACRAMENTO, Calif. (KTXL) — A man wanted for abducting a 3-year-old boy after shooting the child’s mother and another person in Sacramento was arrested early Saturday, and the boy was found safe by authorities 70 miles away.
Video captured from a security camera shows a mother struggle to hold 3-year-old Leo Norvell just before a man, who neighbors said is the boy’s father, ripped him out of her arms.
“Sheer horror,” Jonathan Daniels, a next-door neighbor, recalled. The mother ran to his house following the struggle, desperate to get away. “Felt extremely helpless that I couldn’t do more.”
The woman can be seen pleading with the suspect, 30-year-old Joshua Yago, as she clings to her son.
At one point, Yago can be seen grabbing her left arm and the back of her neck as he pushed her face toward the ground. Daniels said he could hear the boy calling the man “Da Da”.
“He’s the one that kept yelling, ‘Give me my son back,'” Daniels said. “She was just trying to get him to leave.”
As they continue to struggle, Yago grabs Leo’s right arm before pulling him out of his mother’s arms and running with him.
“Once he grabbed the kid, he ran put the kid in the car. She ran home,” Daniels said. “But he reached in the driver’s side of the car and pulled something out and was trying to bust down the door. Then next thing I know, more glass was breaking and then five shots rang out.”
Daniels said the suspect then ran back to the car and took off.
“The cops missed him by 16 seconds,” Daniels said.
Sacramento police said the mother and another man were shot but are doing OK.
Daniels wondered what might have happened if he had been in the suspect’s crosshairs.
“If he was willing to shoot her like that, I could have been shot, too,” Daniels said.
A statewide Amber Alert went out. By Saturday morning, Hayward police had found Leo and Yago together. Yago was booked on charges relating to the kidnapping and shooting.
