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 The Baltimore 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."
