Hearing the screech of an Amber alert is unsettling to say the least, but it prompted a Target employee to help crack a kidnapping case.

Roxanna Ramirez, 22, an employee at a Target store in Pittsburg, Calif. was just doing her job on Friday when she saw a male customer acting strangely. "When I first spotted him in the store, I thought he was going to shoplift," Ramirez told Oakland, Calif. news affiliate KTVU. "He had a backpack, and he was picking things up and putting them down in the men's department."

As a loss-prevention specialist, Ramirez is trained to be on the lookout for suspicious behavior, so she began following the man throughout the store, asking him if he needed assistance, which he declined. Undeterred, Ramirez went to her office and observed him on surveillance cameras. "He was fidgeting around, acting really weird, abnormal. I don't know, it just didn't make me feel comfortable." When the man left the store, Ramirez continued watching him pace in the parking lot, then went outside and got close enough to his gold, Toyota Camry to jot down his license plate number.



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Although Ramirez didn't know it at the time, her instincts were spot-on - the customer, 43-year-old David Douglas would soon be the major suspect in the armed abduction of a 7-year-old girl, reportedly named Natalie Calvo (as identified by the San Francisco Gate) from Antioch.

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Later that night, Ramirez was hanging out with a girlfriend who received an Amber Alert for a missing girl on her cell phone. She showed it to Ramirez, who instantly knew she could help. "She read the description of the car, and I was like, 'hold on', that sounds like somebody I saw earlier at my job! It fits the same description," Ramirez told KTVU. "I was like, 'It's kinda weird' and she said, 'you should call.'" So she did and her information led to the arrest of Douglas, who, hours after leaving the Target store, had abducted Calvo right in front of her home, after following the girl and her mother home after a shopping trip. After a four-hour search, police tracked down Douglas in the Antioch Marina and returned Calvo to her family.

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"We didn't have much information about Douglas, so it's amazing that Roxanna's tip led us straight to him," Capt. Tammany Brooks of the Antioch police department, tells Yahoo Shine. "We're grateful that Roxanna had the foresight to follow her instincts."

Ramirez is amazed, herself, telling KTVU, "They said I helped crack the case, and my heart just dropped, like, really? I couldn't believe it."

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