Driving into your neighborhood to find sheriff’s deputies searching for burglary suspects is disconcerting.

Driving out of the neighborhood a short time later and discovering you’ve got an intruder in tow is terrifying.

For a Florin-area mother and four children, Tuesday afternoon’s experience was worthy of a television drama.

Shannon Carter had taken her children to the movies in the morning and returned home around noon to find Sacramento County sheriff’s deputies and K-9 units throughout the neighborhood. A neighbor told her they were looking for burglars, so she locked her house and garage while she and her children, ages 7, 8 and 9, prepared a lunch to take to an Elk Grove park.

Carter said she recalled opening the garage only briefly before loading her three children and a neighborhood youngster into the seven-passenger sport-utility vehicle and heading for Morse Park. When they reached the park, a young man suddenly popped up from the cargo section of the SUV and began climbing over the seats.

“The kids were screaming at the top of their lungs,” said Carter, who began pulling the youngsters out of the vehicle.

As for the stowaway, she said, “The whole time he was saying over and over, ‘I’m not going to hurt you. I’m not going to hurt anybody.’ “

The young man said he hadn’t done anything wrong, but had gotten in a fight, Carter said.

He ran from the vehicle, then stopped, turned around and apologized again before heading to a neighborhood across from the park, Carter said. She saw him stop a group of kids and ask to use a cellphone. When the person he called didn’t answer, he returned the phone to the kids and ran into the neighborhood.

Carter called Elk Grove police, who were able to retrieve the number the young man called from the borrowed cellphone.

Elk Grove Police Department spokesman Officer Christopher Trim said police searched the surrounding neighborhood but did not locate the man.

Deputy Jason Ramos, Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department spokesman, said a neighbor reported seeing two men breaking a window and entering a house in the 8200 block of Olander Way about noon. No one was in the residence at the time. Deputies searched the neighborhood for about three hours but did not locate the intruders.

Carter said the man in her vehicle appeared to be 16 to 18 years old, with sandy hair in a buzz cut, a description that Ramos said matched that of one of the burglars.

Carter said she was grateful that the young man wasn’t violent. Except for getting the fright of their lives, she and the children weren’t harmed.

“He seemed like a really nice kid that just got in a bad situation,” Carter said.

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