On Thursday, Philadelphia 76ers star J.J. Redick took to his namesake podcast to share an interesting story about his car service experience from the night before.
The incident occurred on Wednesday after a photoshoot in New York City. According to Redick, the brand he was working with arranged for a car service to take him, his wife and his sister-in-law, back to his home in Brooklyn.
When the service arrived, he put his own bags in the trunk of a car. But in doing so, he noticed a strange smell. However, the smell didn’t seem familiar, like “dog food or dog shit,” so he thought nothing of it and got into the car.
As the three passengers proceeded to Redick’s residence, his sister-in-law, “pale as a ghost,” noticed a person was being held captive in the trunk. When Redick turned around to see for himself, he noticed a large blanket covering either a box or a cage, in the truck, which wasn’t walled off from the rest of the car.
Redick asked the driver to pull over.
“We jumped out of the car immediately,” Redick said. “Chelsea [his wife] just kinda doesn’t know what’s going on. And I’m like – as I was getting in the car I noticed the blanket was moving – ‘Sir, you have something in the trunk in your car. Do you know what that is? Is there something in the trunk of your car?'”
“He’s like, ‘No, I don’t have anything back here,’” Redick continued. “And I say, ‘Well, can I get my stuff out?’ So he pops the truck and I kinda – as fast as I can, ‘cause it’s New York City, you don’t know …I’ve seen this blanket move, I don’t know what this is, is it a python? Is it a robber? I don’t know.”
Redick said he retrieved his party’s belongings from the trunk, put them on the sidewalk and continued to press the guy about the mysterious box and blanket.
“And so he lifts the blanket up, but like towards the window, so that the blanket is facing up, so we couldn’t see cause we were on the sidewalk, perpendicular to the car, not behind the car,” Redick explained. “And he’s like, ‘No, there’s nothing in here. There’s nothing in here.’ And he closes the blanket back, and then he closes the trunk.”
“As he’s like walking around to the front seat, a head pops up,” he said. “It’s the – no, this is not funny. Theres a back of a female’s head. She’s – blonde hair, there’s a ponytail, and based on the size of the box or cage that this person is in, it’s like either, like a very small human, or a child. And I’m like—we all saw it, right?”
“So he drives off,” Redick said, “and then Kylee, now at this point, is like, ‘Are you sure? Was that a dog? Was that a dog with a very furry tail?’”
“She’s like, ‘No. The reason I said there was a person is because I saw movement in my peripheral—out of my right eye. So I turned around, and the blanket was moving. So when I looked back, half of a human face came out of the blanket,” he explained. “I saw a woman’s eyes, woman’s face, woman’s blonde hair.”
After the incident, Redick and the two women phoned officials and the car agency, who, in turn, revealed that they had suspended the driver for having someone in the front seat. However, Redick said he made it clear that he described the incident as a man harboring a human under a blanket in his trunk.
“So, possible scenarios here,” he said of the incident that occurred less than 24 hours prior. “I think best-case for everyone involved is that maybe his sister or his cousin, or maybe a girlfriend or wife, needed a ride across town and they didn’t want to pay for an Uber or taxi.”
“That’s probably the best-case scenario,” Redick said. “And then from there, you can go darker. This is not funny, but child abduction, human trafficking. Like, Chelsea’s dead serious texting me today and she’s like, ‘I’m calling the FBI tip line and I’m opening a claim. This is serious.’ I don’t know what to make of it. It definitely was not a dog. I will say that. It was a human being in the back seat of his car, under a blanket in some sort of box or cage. That’s my story.”
