Redick tells Magic’s Bamba a chilling tale
Magic rookie Mo Bamba joined J.J. Redick for his Thursday podcast, expecting to discuss what life’s been like since Orlando drafted him.
Little did he know the chat would get people talking far beyond the NBA. They might even be discussing it at the FBI.
About three minutes into the podcast, Redick started telling a story about finding a woman in a cage earlier this week. The cage was in the back of a Cadillac Escalade in New York City. Huh? Redick, a Magic firstround pick in 2006 who now plays for the 76ers, had finished a photo shoot for a clothing company, which hired a car to take him back to his home in Brooklyn. He was with his wife, Chelsea, and her sister, Kylee.
Redick said he was putting his bags in the trunk and detected a strange smell. The trunk wasn’t walled off from the rest of the vehicle.
After a few minutes in Manhattan traffic, Redick said Kylee became “pale as a ghost.” She tapped him on the shoulder and pointed to box or cage, and the blanket on top was moving. Redick told the diver to pull over.
“We jumped out of the car immediately. Chelsea 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?’ And he’s like, ‘No, I don’t have anything back here.” And I say, ‘Well, can I get my stuff out?’ So he pops the trunk 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 grabbed the bags and pestered the driver to show him what was under the blanket. The driver lifted the blanket, but not in the direction where Redick was standing.
“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. And as he’s like walking around to the front seat, a head pops up.”
At that point, Bamba started laughing.
“It’s the — no, this is not funny. There’s 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, 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?’ And 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. I saw a woman’s eyes, woman’s face, woman’s blonde hair.”
Redick’s group called the car agency and the police, though it’s unclear how long that took. He got an email from the car agency saying it suspended the driver for having somebody in the front seat. But the mystery package/woman was in the trunk.
Redick said he never heard back from the police. So he theorized about what had happened.
“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 best-case scenario. 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.”
It sure beat whatever story Bamba had about the NBA summer league.