Toddler Catches Taxi, Takes Ride To Bronx

A 3-year-old boy gave his mother a good scare when he hopped a cab at Kennedy Airport and ended up with strangers in the Bronx.

They were reunited later in the day.

Little Clifton Duplessy of Queens had arrived at the airport on Wednesday with his mother, Michelle, and two older brothers for a trip to Haiti.

As Duplessy was unloading luggage from their car, Clifton jumped into the front seat of a cab. At the same moment, a woman and her son got into the back seat. The taxi driver assumed Clifton was with them; they thought the boy was the driver’s.

While police searched the airport in Queens for the little boy, the taxi reached the woman’s destination in the Bronx, about 20 miles away.

“When she started to leave the cab, the driver thought she was abandoning her child,” said Officer Robert Schechter, who was flagged down by the cabbie.

Schechter took Clifton to a police station, where officers fed him candy until detectives arrived and took him back to the airport.

“He told me, ‘I miss you, Mommy. I love you, Mommy,”’ Duplessy said. “He said, ‘Why did you leave me?’ I told him, ‘I didn’t leave you. You left me.”’