Bail was set at $100,000 for a Colorado man on Saturday, June 21 after he caused an injury to a child while driving recklessly in Santa Monica.
Officers of the Santa Monica Police Department received a call requesting their assistance regarding some unknown trouble at the Saint John’s Hospital Emergency Room at 11:38 pm on this day.
The reporting party indicated that a young child was refusing to leave with a male and female adult.
Upon arrival the officers spoke with the adult victim, a woman, who told them that earlier that day she had been at the beach with the child and a man.
She said that during the time at the beach she had accidentally sustained a foot injury that had required a trip to the emergency room.
She said that the man had taken herself and the child to the emergency room, and that this man had stated that he would wait for them outside the emergency room while the woman was treated.
After a few hours the woman and the child left the emergency room but were unable to locate the man. They subsequently went to the CVS Pharmacy, located in the 2500 block of Santa Monica Boulevard, in order to fill a prescription.
During the visit to CVS they sent a text message to the man, who then arrived at the pharmacy approximately 10 minutes later.
The woman told the officers that once they were sitting in the man’s automobile, the man started screaming uncontrollably at them and she added that as he drove by the entrance to the emergency room he suddenly slammed the brakes of his car on causing the child (who was not secured by a seat belt) to be propelled into the dashboard of the car and strike her head on said dashboard.
This had caused the little girl to cry loudly.
At that point the woman said that she had attempted to exit the vehicle, but the man was having none of that, and she said that he had grabbed her hair and neck and begun squeezing hard.
She was eventually able to break from his grasp and flee the vehicle with the child.
The officers located this man, of Grand Junction, Colorado and he was arrested and charged with kidnapping and child endangerment.
Editor’s Note: These reports are part of a regular police coverage series entitled “Alert Police Blotter” (APB), which injects some minor editorial into certain police activities in Santa Monica. Not all of The Mirror’s coverage of incidents involving police are portrayed in this manner. More serious crimes and police-related activities are regularly reported without editorial in the pages of the Santa Monica Mirror and its website, smmirror.com.
