Target employee Roxanna Ramirez cracks kidnapping case

A TARGET employee helped save an abducted girl from a kidnapper after noticing his odd behaviour in-store and taking down his license plate.

Roxanna Ramirez, a loss prevention specialist from Califoia, noticed alleged abductor David Douglas, 43, at around 9:50am on Friday moing when he walked in wearing a backpack.

She monitored him on security cameras even after he left the store and remaining in the carpark for a few hours, pacing around his car and changing his clothes.

"At one point, he sat in his car and grabbed the steering wheel and started shaking it violently," Ms Ramirez said. "It was kind of scary."

She zoomed in the camera on his license plate and took down the number. He was gone when she retued from lunch and she forgot about it.

Douglas, who says he does not have a mental illness, said he targeted a number of big department stores and followed three different children. He says he grabbed seven-year-old Natalie Calvo because she was the easiest.

Natalie Calvo, 7, has been retued to her family after being kidnapped.

"I actually just walked up to her and she came with me relatively easy, I mean, I appeared to be someone who could be familiar to her, you know, with her ethnicity,' he told US ABC News from jail.

"So I just sort of put my hands out, and she was kind of startled but she put her hand out and she just, kind of, came with me. And then she tued back and said, "mommy" after we were already getting (in) the car. And that's when her mom came and was alarmed. And I had to kind of hurry up and scoot her out of there."

"I got her in the car ... She said, "I'm scared." I said, "I know, I'm scared too." We were both shaken up for about an hour; it took us both to calm down," he said.

Douglas says the abduction wasn't his idea and claimed there was a govement conspiracy to control every aspect of his life.

Douglas, who is being held on a $US4 million ($4.5 million) bond, offered a long and tearful apology to Natalie and her family and said he was sorry for terrifying them.

Ms Ramirez saved the day later the same night when she was at home.  A girlfriend noticed on Facebook that an Amber Alert had been issued for a missing girl.  Ms Ramirez's friend read a description of the car and the suspect.

David Douglas who allegedly kidnapped seven-year-old Natalie Calvo.

"I was like, "Hold on ..." This was the guy in the store. He looked like that, and that matched the car description," she told the Times.

She phoned police just before 10pm and by 10:45pm they had located him and the girl at the Antioch Marina.

Detectives were so impressed with Ramirez's work that they called by her house to congratulate her.

'What she did was what truly broke the case,' said Antioch police Lt. Tammany Brooks