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With nothing else planned for a Monday night, a group of four Facebooking Quebec friends decided to pile into a car and try their hand at solving a baby snatching.

“We had nothing to do that night,” the Trois-Rivières searchers said in a statement to local media. So, “we went off in search of a red car.”

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The quartet of three women and one man, all in their early 20s, had been spurred into action by Facebook reports of an unusual kidnapping from Sainte-Marie Hospital.

Just before 7 p.m., a woman dressed in red scrubs had walked into the room of Mélissa McMahon. Grabbing Ms. McMahon’s six-pound newborn, the woman wrapped the infant in a blue blanket and told Ms. McMahon she needed to take it away to be weighed.

In “less than a minute,” Ms. McMahon wrote in an online account of the kidnapping, a quick chat with hospital staff convinced her that “my baby had been stolen.”

The mother ran for the hospital’s entrance, only to find that the kidnapper had already fled the property in what witnesses said was a red Toyota Yaris hatchback with a “Bébé à bord” (Baby on Board) sticker on the back window.