The young mother says it was a routine trip on a routine day.

It was Monday, June 3, around 5 p.m. CST. The woman, who CBC is not naming because she fears for her son's safety, was on 37th Street West, a busy residential road that straddles the Dundonald and Hampton Village neighbourhoods in northwest Saskatoon.

She had come there to pick her one-year-old son up from a private daycare. The daycare, near a bus stop and an intersection, had no outside signage suggesting there was a business inside.

The woman parked her SUV in front of the house and left her nine-year-old son buckled in the backseat of the idling auto. Then she went up the short walk to the front door and joined the other parents picking up their kids.

That's when the routine day suddenly wasn't.

"I went from my vehicle to the door, walked in the door, grabbed a backpack and was about to grab my son when my other son was screaming back behind me at the door that someone had stolen the car," she said in an interview.

"So I ran out because I wasn't sure what he meant, I was in shock, and that's when he said, 'Someone took it, someone took it.' "

Even days later, the sequence of events is jumbled in her mind. She said that what the nine-year-old was saying didn't make any sense because she had left him in the SUV seconds earlier.

Suddenly the tumblers clicked into place.

"He just said, 'Mommy, I jumped out of the car.' And then he was just screaming."

Another parent called police. When officers arrived, they realized they could track the SUV using the built-in locator in the woman's iPhone, which was still in the vehicle.

A sighting and a chase

The woman managed to get hold of her husband, who was returning from a weekend fishing trip in northern Saskatchewan.

He was near Rosthern and heading south toward Saskatoon on Highway 11. She filled him in on what had happened.

"I said to my friend who I was with that I guarantee that where the vehicle was stolen from that he's going to hit the highway. I said either he'll go through Martensville, or go through Warman," the father said.

"I said I guarantee we're going to pass him."

Martensville and Warman are on the two main highways heading north out of Saskatoon.

Minutes later, he saw a black SUV matching his wife's make and model came roaring north in the opposite lane. He crossed over, started pursuing it, but then spotted RCMP on the roadside and backed off.

According to a police news release, the suspect doubled back toward Saskatoon. Police used a spike belt to disable the SUV at Marquis Drive and then caught the suspect after a short chase in the Costco parking lot.

A 50-year-old man with no fixed address is now in custody charged with auto theft, fleeing police, dangerous driving and possessing fake ID.

'Stranger danger'

The parents of the nine-year-old know they're lucky nothing worse happened. His father works in law enforcement and attributes his son's quick reaction to lessons given early.

"I can't imagine what my son was thinking. To begin with, if he would have froze and the guy forced him to stay in the vehicle, who knows what would have happened. It's scary as hell and I'm glad it worked out the way it did," he said.

"It's something that is probably going to stay with him for a long time. I'm just glad that all the stuff that I told him from a young age about how to react to certain situations, if they did happen, he actually remembered and did it. Because it saved him."