“Responding officers then made contact with the children and determined they were in good health,” Arlington police spokeswoman Ashley Savage said.
After police officers took the woman to the towing company’s lot to retrieve her children, she was cited for contributing to the delinquency of a minor and allowed to leave. The woman could not be reached Tuesday evening for comment.
John O’Neill, the owner of Advanced Towing in Arlington, said the woman left her white Hyundai Kona with the engine running and doors unlocked for approximately 16 minutes “in a fire lane outside the mall.”
A photo of the vehicle posted on ArlNow.com, which first reported the incident, appears to show a clear view into the SUV through the front window. But the web site did not post an image showing a side view.
O’Neill said the tow-truck driver did not spot the two toddlers strapped into the back seat before pulling away with the vehicle, in part because of the sun’s glare and because, in O’Neill’s telling, the “seats were black leather, and so were the car seats, and the children were African American.”
The children are not visible in photos the driver took from the outside, O’Neill said.
“The kids were both asleep, and they both were covered up,” O’Neill said. “We actually notified the police department that we were towing the vehicle, and the police department called us back to tell us there were kids in the car. Driver pulled over, checked on the kids; they were fine.”
Tow-truck operators have alerted police before when they have found children left in wrongly parked cars on high-temperature days, O’Neill said. “We find them often,” he said.
Advanced Towing has faced allegations of aggressive practices in the past. In 2020, it was sued by then-Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring, who asserted it had broken the law and towed cars without proper authority or warning — though a judge ultimately ordered the company to pay a mere $750 in civil penalties.
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