Ken Watts had a restless night and an eventful morning.
He awoke about 4:30 a.m. to the sound of a motor running, looked out his window and saw a police vehicle outside his house on Wilke Avenue.
"I knew something in my neighborhood was going on," he said.
Watts returned to bed, got up at his usual time and walked to his car about 7:15 a.m. He saw yellow police tape draped around the front yard of a house three doors up the street in his Northeast Baltimore neighborhood.
"I knew something really bad was going on," he said.
He was just about to climb into his Ford Contour when he heard an infant crying.
The 34-year-old computer technician at Morgan State University looked to his right and saw an infant kneeling in the front seat of his neighbor's Acura. The baby, dressed in blue, had his hands pressed to the driver's side window, as if he was trying to get out, and appeared to be shivering.
"He was cold," Watts said.
The resident shouted for an officer up the street and quickly discovered he had found what the police had been looking for since 2:30 that morning - 14-month-old Cory Dwight Green Jr.
Police turned their attention to finding out what happened, and after hours spent interviewing the parents and other relatives, department spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said a child relative embroiled in a family dispute took the infant and put him in the empty car.
It is not being classified as an abduction, the spokesman said, and no charges have been filed "at this time." He said the case has been turned over to the city's Department of Social Services for further review. The other children inside the home were placed with relatives after the parents had called the police.
Nancy Lineman, a spokeswoman with the Maryland Department of Human Resources, which oversees the city's Department of Social Services, said she could not comment on the specific case other than to "verify that all of the children are safe and accounted for."
She said her agency is working with police on the matter.
A man identified as the occupant of the rented house hung up on a reporter and did not return subsequent calls. Watts said that he didn't know the family very well and that "every few months or every year, there's a different family there."
Tamara Brown owns the Acura in which Cory had been placed. She said she left the doors unlocked when she returned late Monday afternoon from picking up her 4-year-old child from school.
She, too, said she woke about 5 a.m. when her pit pull and Rottweiler spotted a police search dog and started barking.
And like Watts, she returned to bed.
Brown and her fiance were getting ready for work when Watts knocked on her door and told her there was an infant in her car. She said her fiance rushed out with a blanket to keep Cory warm.
"I'm just happy and thankful that this is the one day I forgot to lock my car door," Brown said. "Who knows where that child might've ended up?"
