It's hard enough being a parent these days without having your kids taken by a tow truck driver.
And it's even worse when you're slapped with child abandonment charges as a result.
That's the parental predicament being faced by Victor Ruiz, who cops say parked his car in a no-parking zone outside his Houston apartment Thursday and left his two young daughters in the car while he took his groceries inside.
While he was inside, a tow truck driver noticed the illegally parked automobile, and towed it away -- without noticing Ruiz's two daughters were still sitting in the backseat, KRTH.com reported.
According to court documents, the tow truck driver, whose name has not been released, made the discovery after driving two miles. However, Ruiz' neighbor, Sade Jones, said she and other neighbors tried to let the driver know when he was hooking up the car.
"When he pulled into the apartments, he hurried up and hooked his thing on the car," Jones told Click2Houston.com "I'm, like, 'Wait! Them kids in the car.' He snapped the picture and hurry up and sped off with these peoples' cars."
Ruiz was charged with two counts of abandoning a child because the kids were allegedly left without supervision.
He is currently in jail on $4,000 bond.
This isn't the first time a tow truck driver has failed to notice human passengers were inside the cars they were towing.
In April, tow truck drivers in North Carolina failed to notice the dead body of a missing North Carolina woman inside a wrecked car until three days after it was towed from a crash scene.
Back in December, 2010, a Denver tow truck driver hauled away a car blocking a garage downtown, not realizing there was a 9-month-old girl inside.
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