Luis Trinidad, safe but confused
Ethics Tip #1: If you are this stupid and irresponsible, it’s unethical to have children
A Bristol, Connecticut man parked his car outside a store with the doors unlocked, the motor running, and his two-year-old son in the back seat.
Ethics Tip #2: When you witness child endangerment, make sure rescuing the child does not require breaking the law, unless there are no other options to save the child. Calling the police is usually another option.
Outraged by the father’s irresponsible conduct, a citizen who happened to pass by the car, 24-year-old Devon Mills, decided to take matters into his own hands.
Ethics Tip #3: When you hear yourself saying, “This guy needs to be taught a lesson,” stop and think things through: that may be true, but you may not be the appropriate deliverer of the lesson, and the statement is an invitation to overstep one’s authority.
Mills decided that it would serve the father of the child and owner of the car right if he got scared out of his wits.
Ethics Tip #4: Ironically, while “Everybody does it” is a popular invalid rationalization for unethical conduct, the fact that hardly anybody ever does something is usually powerful evidence that it’s a terrible idea.
He decided that making the car’s owner and the child’s father think they had both been stolen was a good idea.
Ethics Tip #4: Your mother was correct: “Two wrongs don’t make a right.”
So Mills got in the car, and drove it away with the child inside.
Ethics Tip #5: Good intentions will not make intrinsically unethical acts—like, say, car theft and kidnapping— ethical.
Mills left the child with a friend, who dropped him off at a police station. He parked the car near where it had been parked.
Ethics Tip #6: Rationalizations like “I’m the good guy, he’s the bad guy,””He had it coming,” “Nobody was hurt,” “It was for a good cause,” “It was just this once,” “I had no choice,” and “There are worse things” aren’t really justifications unethical conduct, and they never sound as convincing when you say them to police after you have been arrested as they seemed when you were contemplating the action that got you arrested.
Mills explained to police that he meant no harm, and was just outraged that a child would be left alone in an unlocked and running automobile.
Ethics Tip #7: When your solution to perceived unethical conduct appears objectively worse than the conduct it is supposed to address, you deflect attention away from that conduct to your own, undermining your original objective.
Mills was charged with car theft and kidnapping. The father of Luis Trinidad, the child left in the car, has apparently not been charged with anything.
Ethics Tip #8: If you are willing to accept the consequences of your unethical actions in order to teach someone a larger lesson, you may be wrong, but you have have displayed courage and integrity. Or you might just be an idiot.
Luis’s father probably won’t leave his child in an unlocked, running automobile again.
But you never know.
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Facts: Digital Spy
Ethics Alarms 
Darwin awards material.
This might be a better world if stupid actually hurt.
It was a dumb move. The best that can be said is that it was this man who did it instead of a thief, a child predator or both. Maybe some good will come out of it. What the man should have done, however, was turn off the car, stood guard over it and the child and, when the idiot father showed up, “reminded” him of his fatherly responsibilities… even if it finally involved a bust in the snoot. Or, if a policeman cruised by beforehand, to flag him down, explain the situation and let him deal with it. I understand the man’s motivation. But you have to be discerning about these things!
We have the thief and kidnapper’s word for it that he didn’t just ‘chicken out’.
While I would encourage such behaviour by a very, very reduced sentence indeed, the fact of the crime remains, beyond reasonable doubt.