For four frantic hours last weekend, Jeffrey Fang’s two youngest children were lost on the streets of San Francisco — moving targets sitting, somewhere, in his carjacked silver minivan.

Mr. Fang, a DoorDash delivery driver, had been working on Saturday night when he encountered the carjacker in a quiet residential neighborhood. There was a brief struggle. A phone was snatched; an accomplice appeared. And in a matter of minutes, Mr. Fang’s van was gone, and the children with it.

While police officers searched the streets of the city, so too did a team of amateur sleuths, including some of Mr. Fang’s friends and several strangers. And around 1 a.m. on Sunday, the children were found in the van, which had been abandoned across town.

“They are OK,” Mr. Fang said in an interview on Monday. “I was able to finally get some sleep last night.”

Mr. Fang, 39, who delivers food to support his wife and three children, said in the interview that mealtimes were the only times of day he could really make a profit. It was difficult to find — let alone pay for — child care during the dinnertime hours, he added, so he would sometimes take his children along with him.

“Most of the people in the gig economy, we’re trying to make it,” Mr. Fang said. “We’re doing what we can, but the odds are stacked against us. It’s not easy. Oftentimes, we have to balance between impossible choices.”

Around 8:45 p.m. on Saturday, Mr. Fang took an order to the residential neighborhood of Pacific Heights. His son, who is just shy of 2 years old, was asleep in the back seat. His daughter, 4, was quietly watching “Shrek 2.”

Mr. Fang stepped out to deliver the meal near the intersection of Jackson and Laguna Streets. When he returned to his van, he saw a man in the driver’s seat.

In a rush of adrenaline, Mr. Fang said he grabbed the man’s arm to pull him out. The two struggled, he said, before the stranger grabbed Mr. Fang’s phone and fled to an apparent getaway car, where another man waited behind the wheel. Mr. Fang said he followed the car on foot as it began to roll away, hanging on to the door handle before somehow making his way inside the vehicle and demanding that the men return his phone. They did, Mr. Fang said — and then he rushed back to the corner of Jackson and Laguna to find his children.

But they, and the van, were gone.

Mr. Fang called the police, and his wife. He also called his friend Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez, a reporter with the public radio station KQED.

Mr. Fang and Mr. Fitzgerald Rodriguez have known each other for nearly a decade; they met as college students and bonded over a shared love of “Star Trek.” Mr. Fitzgerald Rodriguez was at the Oakland home of his fiancée, Anna Kaminski, when he answered Mr. Fang’s call.

“He almost apologizes to me on the phone, like: ‘I’m sorry to ask, but my car was just stolen with two of my kids in the back seat,’” Mr. Fitzgerald Rodriguez said. “I just immediately flew into breaking-news mode.”

Mr. Fitzgerald Rodriguez, 34, figured that he had enough followers on social media to be of some use. So he posted a description of Mr. Fang’s van, a silver Honda Odyssey, and contacted other news outlets to get the word out.

Then he and Ms. Kaminski, 30, set out across the Bay Bridge to find Mr. Fang. She drove, and he tuned into a police scanner using an app on his phone.

“We were kind of tethered to the police scanner,” Ms. Kaminski said. “Not fully knowing what all the codes meant, just listening for any mention of the Honda Odyssey.”

The California Highway Patrol sent out an Amber Alert. Social media posts about the children reached hundreds of thousands of people. And some San Francisco residents took it upon themselves to scour the streets in search of the minivan.

“I was fielding tweets and Facebook messages,” Mr. Fitzgerald Rodriguez said. “It’s just shocking the amount of people who said they would turn their digital reactions into real-life reactions.”

One of them was Max Leung, a community organizer in the Bay Area. He said he was at his home in San Francisco when he learned about the children’s disappearance on social media. He had never met Mr. Fang, but he decided to help.

“I couldn’t just sit at home and worry,” Mr. Leung said. “As soon as I saw the news, my heart sank. All I could think about was how terrified these children must have been, and how worried the parents must have felt.”

As the community mobilized around him, Mr. Fang stayed rooted to the spot where his minivan had disappeared. The police were there, and so were news reporters. In front of rolling cameras, Mr. Fang pleaded for his children’s safe return.

“I was trying not to break down or think about the worst thing that could happen,” Mr. Fang said. “My mind was going through scenarios. Minutes felt like years.”

During the hours he spent in that frenzied haze, Ms. Kaminski and Mr. Fitzgerald Rodriguez appeared with coffee and food from McDonald’s. Mr. Leung arrived, too.

It wasn’t until early Sunday morning that the police pulled Mr. Fang aside to let him know that his children had been found. They were still inside the minivan, which had been abandoned. It was spotted by two officers patrolling in the department’s Bayview District.

“It was immediate relief, for sure,” Ms. Kaminski said, adding that her fiancé was so excited he had spilled his drink.

“I threw my coffee in the air so high, it came splattering behind us,” Mr. Fitzgerald Rodriguez said.

“We just screamed and cried and hugged each other,” Mr. Leung said.

“I was extremely elated and thankful,” Mr. Fang said.

Tony Xu, the chief executive of DoorDash, expressed relief in an emailed statement. “As a father myself, I can only imagine how terrifying this incident must have been for Mr. Fang and his family,” he said. “We have been in contact with him to offer our full support and our thoughts remain with him and his loved ones.”

A GoFundMe page that Mr. Fitzgerald Rodriguez set up to “help the Fang family take some time off to rebound” from the ordeal had raised nearly $140,000 by Wednesday, exceeding a $100,000 goal.

After the children were recovered, the police took them to a hospital to check for injuries. And around dawn on Sunday, Mr. Fang welcomed them back home. The children, he said, did not seem to remember much; it was possible that they had slept through much of the episode.

The San Francisco Police Department expressed appreciation for the public support. “There was significant social media generated regarding this incident,” Sgt. Michael Andraychak, a department spokesman, said on Monday.

But he said the social media posts and public input did not appear to have led to the discovery of the minivan in Bayview.

Still, Mr. Fang said he was grateful to all of the people who had rallied to help on Saturday night. “I am super thankful for it,” he said. “It brings hope back into one’s heart about the state of humanity and society — that good can come of it.”

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