A Lake County sheriff’s deputy called Volkswagen while a carjacked Atlas, with a two-year-old boy inside, was still missing. The representative didn’t hand over the location. According to the family’s lawsuit, “free trial period for Car-Net had expired.” A federal court described the allegations in Shepherd v. Volkswagen Group of America, Inc., No. 23-cv-16819, in an order dated Sept. 26, 2025. Judge Franklin U. Valderrama of the Northern District of Illinois, in Chicago, denied every motion to dismiss. The order does not say how the incident ended.
The suit names Volkswagen Group of America, Bosch Security Services, Randstad North America and one individual employee, and it pleads two claims, negligence and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Volkswagen moved to dismiss, Bosch asked to join that motion, and Randstad filed its own. Bosch and Randstad adopted Volkswagen’s arguments, so the judge ruled on those. The Auto Wire reported on a lawsuit over the same allegations when it was filed in 2023.
The terms of service stayed out of the room
Car-Net, in the court’s description, is a subscription service that can help locate stolen vehicles for paying customers. The defendants wanted the judge to read its terms of service, which the complaint mentions, and conclude they owed the family no duty. The judge declined. A court deciding a motion to dismiss takes the complaint’s allegations as true and generally looks outside it only at documents central to the claims; the order says the terms were not central, because the family alleges no violation of them and seeks no contractual right. The judge said the terms cannot be used to show the defendants owed no duty.
On the negligence claim, the court applied Illinois’s four-factor duty test from LaFever v. Kremlite Co. and found the family had adequately alleged a duty. The order adds that the defendants did not meaningfully engage with that analysis and that the court would not build their arguments for them.
Distress claims without a crash injury
The defendants leaned on cases about negligent infliction of emotional distress, a claim the family never made. They also cited Restatement section 436A, which covers distress without physical injury, for the first time in a reply brief. The court took it up anyway and noted that lasting psychological harm might count as bodily harm under Illinois law. That question waits. On the intentional claim, the court agreed without deciding that refusing to help police rescue an abducted child could count as extreme and outrageous conduct. It also rejected the argument that the representative had to be present with the family: Illinois law does not require it, and the family alleged the representative knew who would suffer, since the representative needed the owner’s identity to activate the account and locate the car.
A lapsed free trial, a deputy on the phone
None of this is a finding that Volkswagen or anyone else did what the family says. A denial of a motion to dismiss means the claims are plausible enough to go forward on the assumption they are true, and the defendants have not yet had to prove anything. The order does not report any statement from Volkswagen about the call.
What the family alleges, as the court recounts it, is that a deputy asked for location data on a car with a child in it and the answer turned on whether the owner’s trial period had run out. The case asks whether a company that sells vehicle location to subscribers owes anything to a deputy’s call when a two-year-old is in the car. The court has not answered that. It found a duty adequately alleged and sent the question on.
What happens next
The order resolves only the motions to dismiss. Negligence and intentional infliction of emotional distress both go forward against all four defendants, and the order sets no further deadlines.
Say the allegations are true: a deputy on the phone, a toddler in the car, an account that lapsed. Should the answer ever depend on whether the owner kept paying?