A documented case
Whatever is inside a vehicle leaves with it.
We say on our Parking Enforcement page that an immobilized vehicle cannot be driven away, and that whatever is inside it — medication, a laptop, a pet, a child — stays where the owner left it.
People sometimes assume the last one is rhetorical. It isn't.
In June 2004 the Lexington Herald-Leader reported that a tow truck driver removed a vehicle from a Lexington apartment complex with a two-year-old child inside it.
The driver noticed the child while at an intersection some distance away, notified his company, and asked police to meet him back at the complex. The boy was returned uninjured about fifteen minutes after the car was taken. The driver was cited for endangering the welfare of a minor. The child's father was also cited, for leaving a child unattended in a vehicle.
“Car is towed with child inside,” by Joseph Lord, Lexington Herald-Leader, Sunday, June 20, 2004, City & Region section.
We have deliberately not named the driver or the towing company. The point of this is not so much who it was, but that it actually happened, right here in Lexington, Kentucky, on a private property impound.
Nobody in that story set out to do harm. The driver did the right thing the moment he realized. That is precisely why it is worth reading — it did not take a bad actor. It took a vehicle leaving a parking lot with something inside it that nobody saw.
Why we work the way we do
A vehicle that is immobilized does not go anywhere. It stays in the space its owner parked it in, with everything that was in it, until its owner pays and we come back and take the device off.
That is not a small operational preference. It removes an entire category of risk from the property we are working for.