A routine traffic stop conducted by a South Carolina police officer soon became a rescue from an alleged kidnapping.
On May 28, an officer from the North Myrtle Beach Police Department appeared to save a woman who was allegedly being forced to drive a white Jeep by a male passenger—who police identified as 29-year-old Collins Xavier Manning Bates—after he had allegedly just shot someone.
The police officer, listed as Officer Wallace, initially pulled over the vehicle after she saw it skip a red light at an intersection. When Wallace approached the vehicle, which had a woman behind the wheel and Bates in the passenger’s seat, she “noticed the driver appeared distressed,” the police department’s public information officer told E! News in a statement June 15.
“While the male passenger wasn’t looking at the driver, the female silently mouthed ‘Help Me’ repeatedly,” police said. “Officer Wallace observed the driver’s message and removed the passenger from the vehicle, placing him in the back seat of her patrol car.”