Shomrim of Baltimore, the volunteer Jewish civilian patrol agency, came to the rescue on Dec. 10 when a San Francisco woman appears to have mistakenly — and fortuitously — called the organization after she and her children became trapped in a storage unit on Cesar Chavez Street.
The woman, whose identity has not been released, was at the storage facility with her two kids around 9 p.m. when it closed for the evening and she got trapped inside. It’s unclear how she wound up calling Shomrim’s hotline in Baltimore, but responder Yitzy Schleifer, the dispatcher who took her call, speculated that she meant to access San Francisco’s 415 area code and instead dialed Baltimore’s, which is 410.
“It was a little after midnight here on Tuesday morning, and I answered the phone to a lady just screaming for help on the other end. She was a Spanish speaker, with very little English, she was very, very upset, and she was saying her phone was dying,” said Schleifer, who has volunteered with Shomrim for about four years.
Schleifer was trying to determine in which Maryland county the woman was located when she said “San Francisco.” He and other dispatchers set about trying to contact the owners of the storage facility, to no avail, and eventually called the San Francisco Police Department. Schleifer was able to direct them to the storage facility on Cesar Chavez Street, where officers located the woman and her children and freed them around 9:40 p.m., according to SFPD spokesman Albie Esparza.
“We get calls from other places fairly often — sometimes it’s people from out of the area looking for a missing person who might have come to Baltimore, and recently we were helping out with recovery from [Hurricane] Sandy,” said Schleifer. “But this was a pretty unique one.” — emma silvers