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11-15-2013, 12:53 PM
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Toddler Taken From Roadside; Suspect Never Found
A woman stranded on a dark country road in Washtenaw County called 911 in the early morning hours of Oct. 26, 2013, to report that a man who had stopped to help with her broken-down car had instead grabbed her 2-year-old son and sped away. The Michigan State Police issued an Amber Alert and began searching the rural roads southeast of Ann Arbor. The call came in about 1:11 a.m. from Whittaker Road, south of Judd Road, in Augusta Township, according to The Ann Arbor News, which later obtained the recording through a public records request. The caller was so distraught she could barely speak, and a female dispatcher spent much of the roughly 16-minute call trying to calm her and pin down her location while a trooper drove the unlit roads looking for her Ford Taurus. "They took him in a car," the woman says at one point. "I'm in the dark. I'm in the country." The woman told the dispatcher her car had broken down and that a man in an older, rusty red pickup pulled over and offered help, according to the recording. She said the man took the boy while he was putting gas in her tank, then drove off heading north. Two other young children, ages 3 and 4, were in the back seat and were not harmed. Police described the suspect only as a white man about 5 feet 10 inches tall. Searchers found the boy safe and unharmed about 12 hours later, lying in a ditch near his grandmother's home, roughly two miles from where his mother said he had been taken. Family members located him, and he was taken to C.S. Mott Children's Hospital in Ann Arbor to be checked over. The Amber Alert was canceled. Weeks later, investigators said they had made no progress. The man and the rusty red pickup described in the mother's account were never found. "The investigation continues," Lt. Mike McCormick of the Michigan State Police said in November 2013. "We have not developed any suspects." Police never released the mother's name. A spokeswoman for the family, Asha Morrell, said the woman did not want it made public and was still cooperating with detectives. On the 911 call, the mother identified herself only as "Miah."
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