Michigan gas station clerk saves teen from alleged kidnapper after she whispers ‘help’

A gasoline station clerk who came to a suburban Detroit girl’s defense when she entered his store and mouthed the word “help” ultimately had a hand in saving the teenager after a stranger had kidnapped her at gunpoint on her way to school, according to authorities.

“I believe this could have [gone] a lot worse than it did,” said police chief Hussein Farhat of Hamtramck, Michigan, at a news conference addressing a rescue partially attributed to convenience store employee Abdulrahman Abohatem. “We have every belief that this could have ended really badly.”

As first reported by the Michigan news outlet WXYZ, the 16-year-old girl at the center of the case was waiting for a school bus in Hamtramck to take her to classes at Frontier International Academy on the morning of 13 April when a gun-wielding man whom she did not know kidnapped her.

The man, who had evidently targeted the girl at random, eventually brought her to a Sunoco gasoline station in nearby Detroit where Abohatem was working as a clerk. Abohatem later told WXYZ that he became suspicious of the situation when the man asked the girl to pay for cigarettes.

Abdulrahman Abohatem. Photograph: GoFundMe

“Then, she mouthed … to me, like with no sound: ‘Help,’” Abohatem recounted to the outlet. He described getting out from behind the front counter’s protective glass, placing himself between the man and the girl and ordering him to leave the business.

Some of the girl’s fellow students who had witnessed the abduction had managed to track the location of the victim’s cellphone. They provided that information to police, and officers arrived at the Sunoco as Abohatem was escorting the man, whom he realized was an alleged kidnapper, out of his store.

Upon seeing the police, Abohatem instinctively pointed to the man he was kicking out of the store and told officers, “That’s the guy,” he recalled to WXYZ.

Officers quickly arrested the man, whom the Hamtramck police as Donald Fields, a 48-year-old registered sex offender. Without elaborating, police said prosecutors charged Fields with criminal sexual conduct, kidnapping, illicit possession of a gun, felonious assault and of being a habitual offender.