J.J. Redick said a woman was in a 'box or cage' in the back of his car service ride in New York City
Philadelphia 76ers guard J.J. Redick shared a story on “The J.J. Redick Podcast” on Thursday that is extremely unusual.
Redick started off the episode explaining that he was doing a photo shoot in New York City earlier this week for Mr. Porter.com. When the shoot ended, the company arranged a car to pick up him, his wife Chelsea and his wife’s twin sister Kylee — who accompanied him to the shoot — and take them home.
Redick and Kylee each had a bag with them, so Redick went to put them in the back of the Escalade that picked them up. He said he noticed a smell in the back of the car, but couldn’t tell exactly what it was.
“I was like, ‘It smells kind of weird.’ It didn’t smell like dog food or dog s—, it was just like a weird smell,” Redick said. “At the time, I didn’t think anything of it.”
So he hopped in the car, and they took off.
When the car came to a stop at a corner some time later, Kylee tapped Redick on the shoulder and was “pale as a ghost.”
“There’s a person in the back,” Kylee whispered to Redick.
“What? There’s a body in the back?” Redick replied.
“No, there’s a person in the back,” Kylee whispered.
So Redick looked over his shoulder and saw a big blanket and a cage or a box. There was clearly something under the blanket, he said.
So they asked the driver to pull over. When he did, they hopped out immediately. As he got out of the car, he noticed the blanket was moving.
“Sir, you have something in the trunk of your car. Do you know what that is? Is there something in the trunk of your car?” Redick asked the driver.
The driver responded and said he didn’t have anything in the back. So Redick quickly got their stuff out of the car as fast as he could.
“It’s New York City. You don’t know. I’ve seen this blanket move. I don’t know what this is. Is it a python? Is it a robber? I don’t know.”
Once he had their things and were on the sidewalk, Redick asked the driver again.
Here’s Redick’s description of what happened next, from “The J.J. Redick Podcast”:
The car is facing, going directionally, like sort of perpendicular to us.
“Sir, I think there’s a person in your back seat.”
So he lifts the blanket up, but like toward the window so that the blanket is facing up so we wouldn’t see, because we were on the sidewalk perpendicular to the car, not behind the car.
He’s like, “No, there’s nothing in here. There’s nothing in here.”
He closes the blanket back, and then he closes the trunk. And as he’s walking around to the front seat, a head popped up.
No, this is not funny. There’s a back of a females head. She’s blonde hair, there’s a pony tail, and based on the size of the box or cage that this person is in, it’s like either a very small human or a child.
We all saw it. So he drives off.
Kylee now, at this point, it’s like, “Are you sure? Was that a dog? Was that a dog with like a very furry tail?”
And she’s like, “No. The reason I said there was a person is because I saw movement in my peripheral — out of my right eye. So I turned around and the blanket was moving. So when I looked back, like half of a human face came out of the blanket. I saw a woman’s eyes, woman’s face, woman’s blonde hair.”
They then hailed a cab to take them the rest of the way.
Redick then said he called the car agency, who “acted like I didn’t know what I was talking about.” Then he contacted the police, who he has not yet heard back from, to file a report.
He later received an email from the car agency saying that the driver has been suspended because “there was someone in his front seat,” even though Redick had explicitly told them that “he was harboring some sort of female under a blanket in a cage or box” in the trunk.
Redick said he has not heard back from the police yet, though Chelsea did contact the FBI tip line to open a claim.
“Best case for everyone involved is that maybe his sister or his cousin, or maybe a girlfriend or wife needed a ride across town, and they didn’t want to pay for an Uber or a taxi. That’s probably best case scenario,” Redick said. “From there you can go darker. And this is not funny, but like child abduction, human trafficking?”
“I don’t know what to make of it,” Redick added. “It definitely was not a dog. It was a human being in the back seat of his car, under a blanket in some sort of box or cage.”
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