68 police cars searched for girl left in Uber

Mom regrets not using Taxi

Julie Viscomi, the Toronto mother whose daughter was still in an Uber when it pulled away from her home last winter, told Taxi News she sincerely regretted not using a licensed Taxi.

“I believe that had we used a regulated Taxi that night, the dispatcher would have contacted the driver immediately, no questions asked,” Viscomi said.

Taxi brokerages including Beck Taxi in Toronto and Blue Line in Ottawa say they would have located the driver in five minutes or less.

Viscomi has been interviewed by multiple media sources about the incident, which was remarkable not in the fact that the driver inadvertently pulled away without realizing that a small child who had fallen asleep was still in the back bench of his van, but that Uber Corporate refused to help the parents contact the driver and Uber also refused to help police.

“Uber did not provide any assistance,” Toronto police spokesperson Cindy Chung said. The Toronto Star reports that Toronto police confirmed not one of them got back to any of the officers who stood in the driveway with Viscomi at her partner’s North York home while dozens of cruisers, from across the GTA, searched for her daughter.

68 Toronto police cars were involved at the height of the seach, Viscomi told Taxi News, “and that did not count the 6 or 7 officers standing in my living room.”

Uber’s privacy policy ensures that neither drivers nor riders see each other’s real phone numbers when communicating through the app. Instead, a temporary, anonymized number is used, which changes after each use. This prevents drivers from saving and contacting riders later. 

“The customer service person told me it was against their privacy policy for them to contact the driver. I looked up the policies, and sure enough, it is a policy of theirs – they cannot call the driver, which is insane. So it’s not that I was the exception,” explains Viscomi, who says she has barely been able to sleep since the event occurred.

“We recognize how distressing this situation was for the family involved and are thankful that the child was safely reunited with their parent,” Uber told Taxi News in a statement. “We immediately began reviewing the details of this incident internally to identify opportunities to improve our processes and support systems. The safety of everyone who uses Uber remains our top priority.”

Viscomi’s mission now is to see Uber change the corporate policy which prevented them from providing the driver’s contact information to the parents or the police.

“Uber is enormously under fire these days. Just in general, people are commenting they are fed up with Uber’s lack of customer support. They hide behind these bogus policies – in our case, no one wanted the driver’s personal information, we just wanted THEM to contact the driver.

“I think we are going to see a shift back to Taxis,” Viscomi predicts.

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The text below is a portion of the transcript of Viscomi’s interview with David Common of CBC’s Metro Morning, which provides the step-by-step description of what occurred the night of the incident.

Because Viscomi is suffering anxiety and trauma as a result of the event, Taxi News opted not to ask her to repeat the entire story for this article but is posting the CBC transcript for readers’ information.

ONTARIO MOM SAYS UBER REFUSED TO HELP AFTER DRIVER DROVE OFF WITH SLEEPING 5-YEAR-OLD

DAVID COMMON (Host): A nightmare for certainly one Ontario mom who says her Uber driver drove away with her five-year-old daughter in the backseat. When she called that rideshare company, they refused to contact the driver, so she called police who found her daughter unharmed a little more than an hour later. But the cops didn’t get any help from Uber either. That mom, Julia is in studio with us this morning. We’re only using her first name to protect the identity of her daughter. Julia, good morning.

JULIA (Mother): Good morning.

COMMON: This happened back in March. How are you, first of all?

JULIA: I I’m trying to live a normal life, but I’m hardly eating or sleeping and certainly not thriving, that’s for sure.

COMMON: Let’s go back to the night itself. You’re coming back home, it’s about 11:00 at night. What happens?

JULIA: So, my partner and I had taken his two young kids, my two young kids downtown to go to a Raptors game. Upon returning to the vehicle, we realized he had a flat tire. So, we elected to take an Uber back to his house. At some point along the way, my five-year-old daughter had fallen asleep in the back of the vehicle.

COMMON: 11:00 at night, yeah.

JULIA: As one does. Once we returned to the house, my partner had explained that he had left his house key inside the home, and so the only way to get inside would be by using the garage remote opener that was in my vehicle and so while still sitting beside the driver, I loudly announced, okay, you get the three awake kids there booster seats, their winter coats out of the vehicle while you’re doing that, instead of just standing there, I’ll make myself useful. I’ll open the garage door and then I’ll hurry back to get my daughter. But when I returned, the driver had taken off with her still in the car.

COMMON: And in that moment…

JULIA: First, it was disbelief. I couldn’t believe this had happened. It was literally seconds that I had been away from the vehicle. I thought it was unintentional, but even if so, he had expressed that we were his last ride for the evening. It’s 11 p.m.. It’s minus three degrees. She’s asleep, so she can’t vocalize anything. Panic was very quickly setting in. The other three kids are terrified. I’m trying to console them. I thought surely he’d see her in his rearview mirror and turn around, but he never did.

COMMON: So, it is possible, as many people who use Uber will know to contact the driver, but once the ride has ended, is that possible anymore?

JULIA: I’m not overly familiar with Uber, but my initial instinct was to try to contact the driver, and so I instructed my partner to do so. He retrieved the number from the app, attempted to call, couldn’t be connected. I attempted to call several times from my phone, wouldn’t be connected, so I hurriedly said call Uber customer support.

COMMON: You did that. You knew it was the driver’s last call of the night or so he told you, and that his plan was to go home. You reach out to customer support. What do they tell you?

JULIA: My partner explained the emergency situation and simply request that they contact the driver and completely unapologetically, without any empathy whatsoever, they said, we can’t do that. It’s outside of our policy.

COMMON: They can’t call the driver who has your daughter in his back seat.

JULIA: Apparently. I mean, it’s not like it’s a phone or a purse. It’s a five-year-old child. But they refused over and over again. I even tried to reason with them. They refused. So now my panic has transitioned into sheer terror.

COMMON: You called 911?

JULIA: Yes.

COMMON: What do they tell you?

JULIA: 911, the police arrive shortly thereafter. They immediately call Uber, identified themselves as Toronto Metro Police, explain the situation, request information about the driver. Again, Uber cites policy, refuses to contact the driver and also refuses to give police any information whatsoever. They instead direct police to this portal that Uber has specifically for law enforcement and it’s now my understanding that in order to use this portal, one has to first create an account. Then you have to take anywhere between 15 and 45 minutes to enter the requisite information into the portal and then any time between hours and days later, Uber would contact the police. But you can imagine that during a potential child abduction, this protocol, this system is hardly helpful. Every minute is of the essence and every minute that she’s out there, she’s at greater risk. It’s just insanity to me that they refuse to help the police.

COMMON: This was not an abduction in that sense. But of course, in that moment you had no idea.

JULIA: We had no idea.

COMMON: You had some kind of bad guy taking your kid or was this a mistake and your kid on a freezing night in March was in the backseat of a car that was about to be shut off and left for the night?

JULIA: Yeah, well, again, I didn’t know. I mean, initially I thought it was a mistake, but then, you know, he still hadn’t noticed her in his rearview mirror. Several minutes had gone by. The clock was ticking, and your mind starts to fill in the blanks with all kinds of things you just don’t want to think about and I don’t think there’s any point in mentioning what could have happened in that time. It’s very obvious.

COMMON: The police were able to find the driver.

JULIA: An hour and 20 minutes later, they told me they were able to track the driver down without any help from Uber whatsoever. She was thankfully asleep the entire time and physically unharmed.

COMMON: Did they just bring her back to you?

JULIA: They offered to. I elected to be taken to her. I figured that would be slightly less traumatic for her. En route to her, they explained that she would be in an ambulance not because she was physically harmed, but because it’s protocol for them to medically check children who had been taken from the home and I’ll never forget that moment when I… sorry, when I arrived, she was indeed in the back of an ambulance and I’ve never seen her in such a state before. She was terrified.

COMMON: What has Uber said to you in the aftermath of this?

JULIA: Well, the next day, Uber emailed my partner an automated $10 credit for our troubles I suppose. They also assured him that he would not be matched up with this driver again, and they refunded the fare. Obviously, none of this was satisfactory to me. I went through multiple, multiple avenues to get a hold of the Uber higher ups and for the last five weeks I had been speaking with their insurer, trying to come to a quiet resolution and to get them to take accountability. But not only have they refused to take any accountability whatsoever, they have insisted that their policies are not unreasonable and that they, quote unquote, don’t owe me anything because she wasn’t physically harmed.

COMMON: They’ve said to us in a statement that the safety of everyone who use their service is the company’s top priority. After this experience, do you believe that’s true?

JULIA: Not at all. Actions speak louder than words. They’ve clearly prioritized rigid policy over a child’s life and if that can happen to me, that can and will happen to anybody else unless they are forced to change their policies and if they are refusing to learn from this situation and to grow and to take this opportunity to say, okay, something needs to change here, then this needs to be forced upon them, which is why after five weeks of trying to handle this quietly, I’ve decided to go public.

COMMON: How’s your daughter?

JULIA: Well, we’re trying to achieve normal life. She’s going to school every day. I’m going to work every day. She still talks about that night. She now equates going downtown with being in an ambulance. There have been two marked changes in her behaviour since this has happened, which I won’t get into here, but I’m monitoring her closely and she said to me several times, she never wants to be in a taxi again.

COMMON: Do you think you’ll ever be in an Uber again?

JULIA: Oh, absolutely not. Absolutely not. How can I trust a company that claims that they care about the well-being of their passengers if this was my experience? There was no need for them to not call the driver in a very clear emergency situation. We were not requesting the driver’s information. We were asking them to contact and I can bet you any money that had we used a regulated taxi that night, the dispatcher would have contacted the driver immediately, no questions asked.

COMMON: Julia, thank you for telling us your story this morning.

JULIA: Thank you for having me.

COMMON: Julia is the mom of a five-year-old whose Uber driver unknowingly drove away with the child still inside the vehicle, asleep. Of course, Julia did not know that at the time. This could well have been an abduction. We’ve only used her first name to protect the identity of her daughter. Uber’s customer service refused to contact the driver because of what they called a company policy.

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