Sprint Under Fire In Missing Baby Case

(CBS)  Sprint is taking heat amid accusations that it refused to help a California couple find an infant left in the family SUV that was stolen with the baby still in it.

As The Early Show national correspondent Hattie Kauffman

reports

, 11-month-old Wade Cochran was in a car seat in the vehicle when it was snatched from the driveway of his Riverside County home.

"I was just so frantic to get our son back," Wade's mother, Stephanie Cochran, told Kauffman. "That's all I cared about. I was like, take whatever you want, just give me back my baby."

Wade's father, Jason Cochran, had put him in the family SUV, and gone back to the house to get Wade's three-year-old brother, Blake.

"I picked (Blake) up and walked back out the front door, and I looked out in the driveway, and the car was missing with Wade in it," Jason recalls.

Stephanie says she shrieked, " 'What do you mean, the car is gone?' So I came running out and looked."

The Cochrans knew their Sprint cell phone, with a Global Positioning System, was inside the SUV.

Jason says it was their "one ray of hope. We didn't have any other way of tracking the car, except for the phone."

So they called Sprint and asked the company to activate the GPS.

"Obviously," Stephanie says, "I'm frantic on the phone pleading for help. I gave them all the security questions they asked."

But, the Cochrans charge, Sprint officials refused to activate the GPS, saying they needed to be contacted by law enforcement first.

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