baltimoresun.com
'Nanny attack' in Bolton Hill has an unexpected ending
By Peter Hermann

Baltimore Sun reporter

June 4, 2009

The 8-month-old baby girl had fallen asleep in her stroller, and her nanny, Siwei Yao, decided to push her back to her Bolton Street home. It was shortly before 2 p.m., a sunny afternoon on Monday on tree-shaded Bolton Street, in front of a church, and Yao paid no attention as two men in T-shirts walked by.

Then one of the men grabbed her from behind in a chokehold and knocked her to the ground.

"I couldn't breathe," the 24-year-old Yao said. "He hit me on the back. I couldn't scream." The other man moved the carriage about six feet away, waking baby Christine from her nap, and rifled through the blankets. They left two plastic toys but took Yao's iPod from her pocket before running away.

Yao retreated to the child's home, a converted church just up the street, and dialed 911.

The time: 2:02 p.m.

A police officer showed up more than 90 minutes later and characterized the attack as a larceny, defined simply as the removal of someone's personal property, such as stealing a cell phone from a parked car.

Police wrote a new report Tuesday after inquiries from TheBaltimore Sun, and upgraded the call to an unarmed assault and robbery.

As Yao, an au pair who has been in the U.S. for just six months, blogged about her Baltimore experience to her friends back in China, the baby's father, Travis Hardaway, wondered whether police had tried to downgrade this crime, only to rush to reinvestigate after the newspaper called and requested a copy of the report.

Hardaway said it was only then that he got a call from the department's public affairs office, a subsequent visit from three uniformed officers, a call from a city councilman and another visit from police, who asked him whether he was satisfied.

Police said the report given to The Sun was written Tuesday, June 2, the day after the attack, but in a box labeled "Date / Time of This Report," the officer wrote, "1 June." The officer also noted the time of the attack as 2:30 p.m. and the report was taken at 3 p.m., even though police said Yao called 911 at 2:02 p.m. and the officer was dispatched at 3:33 p.m.

The officer wrote in the follow-up: "This report was upgraded from a larceny to an unarmed assault and robbery."

Yao said she told the first responding officers that she didn't want to go to the police station because she couldn't leave the baby, and that she was confused about procedures in America. "They told me, 'Do you want us to take a report or go find him?' " Yao said. "They told me, 'It's up to you, it's your choice to have a report.' I said I'm not hurt and the iPod wasn't very expensive, and I want them caught as soon as possible."

A police spokeswoman called the above exchange a misunderstanding between the officers and Yao. The spokeswoman described a combination of factors that contributed to the way the call was handled, including young officers, their inability to fully understand or take the time to understand Yao's broken English, that the initial call was dispatched as "not in progress," that the first officer sent was diverted to another emergency and the next officer was delayed because the district was changing shifts.

The spokeswoman, Officer Nicole Monroe, said she called Hardaway after receiving The Sun's request. "I knew that somebody had to go back, that we didn't have all the facts, that we needed to take more time," Monroe said. She said that even though the first officer wrongly labeled the crime a larceny, his narrative indicated that it was far more serious and that a supervisor would have eventually ordered it reclassified.

Yao was attacked just minutes after Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III stood about 2 miles away in the Inner Harbor and complained that residents don't believe him when he says statistics show crime is down. "I know we'll get the skepticism about fuzzy math and whether we're accurately reporting crime," he said.

The way police handled the attack in Bolton Hill wouldn't tend to ease people's concerns. Hardaway said he feels that without outside intervention, the attack on his caregiver and his infant would forever have been recorded as a simple theft, its violent overtones ignored and the assailants never sought.

At a Bolton Hill community meeting Tuesday night, Charles Hess, the neighborhood services police officer, told residents that Yao nearly lost consciousness in the attack and that the district commander "became upset" when he learned of the brazen daylight crime - which Hess called "the nanny attack." The officer said more patrols and undercover officers would be put on the streets.

Yao said that after the attack, she was afraid to take the baby out for a walk, but now she feels better. She doesn't know whether police handled the call correctly but said she was pleasantly surprised by what happened later, something she said doesn't happen in China: Neighbors visited and called, and invited her to join them as they walk babies in groups during the afternoon.

"I feel the power of the citizens," Yao said.

That's the message she blogged home to China.