  Police Central Software Key to Arrest in Abduction Case
(The following is from a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
article by Torslen Ove, staff writer)
Four days after police say a Texas truck driver abducted an
8-year-old Lawrenceville boy and sexually assaulted him, the FBI and the Kansas Highway
Patrol tracked down his tractor-trailer on a Kansas highway using global positioning
satellite technology and took him into custody.
Carlitos Bell, 30, A professional trucker from Converse,
Texas, who had traveled to Pittsburgh on business Sunday, was being held yesterday in a
Wichita jail on a federal charge of unlawful flight to avoid apprehension.
When he was arrested, police said, Bell was wearing a
cowboy hat. The boy told detectives that the man who assaulted him was wearing a similar
hat.
Following the outcome of an extradition hearing, Bell could
face state charges of kidnapping, unlawful restraint, reckless endangerment, aggravated
assault, involuntary deviate sexual intercourse and corrupting minors.
Police said Bell snatched the boy, apparently at random,
while he was playing baseball by himself at the 57th Street playground a block
from his house Sunday afternoon. He had gone out to play at about 2 p.m. and was expected
back for dinner at about 5 p.m. When he didn’t come home, his parents called police
at 6 p.m. State police initially told reporters he had been reported missing at 2 p.m.
An hour later, a motorist found the boy wandering naked
along the berm of Interstate 79 near Bridgeville.
Pittsburgh police, Pennsylvania State Police and the FBI
had worked steadily on the case since the boy was found, and last night at a news
conference they obviously were relieved to have made an arrest in what they said was an
unusual crime.
Abductions of children by strangers are extremely rare,
according to the FBI.
"This is one of the happiest days of my life,"
said Cmdr. Gwen Elliot, head of the city’s sex assault squad. "This is the first
abduction that I have had that was done by a stranger, and I’ve been doing this for
23 years. The only abductions I personally have known of were by family," usually in
custody battles between parents.
Elliot would not discuss the details of the assault.
But she said Bell lured the boy into his truck and attacked
him somewhere between Pittsburgh and Bridgeville. Afterward, she said he stopped the rig,
laid the naked boy down on the berm of the highway near the Bridgeville exit of I-79 and
drove away.
A motorist saw the boy minutes later at 7 p.m., drove him
to a gasoline station and called police. The child was treated at St. Clair Hospital in
Mt. Lebanon and released to his parents. Elliot said the boy seemed to be doing well
physically.
After the boy described the trucker, detectives examined
the sign-in sheets of trucking companies in the Lawrenceville area and did background
checks on the names listed. Elliott said a background check of Bell (by the Bexar County, TX Sheriff with Police Central)
showed he had three prior sex assault charges against children in Texas.
The next step was to find out where he was. FBI agents
contacted Bell’s company, FFE Trucking of Dallas, which uses a global positioning
satellite system to track its trucks across the country.
Rick Mosquera, special agent in charge of the Pittsburgh
office of the FBI, said the company locked onto Bell’s rig in Omaha, Neb., early
yesterday.
At about 3:30 p.m., FBI agents from the Wichita office and
Kansas state troopers pulled over Bell’s rig on the north side of Wichita and
arrested him.
Mosquera said once Bell is returned to Pennsylvania, the
U.S. attorney’s office will work with the Allegheny County district attorney’s
office to decide what charges to file against Bell. |
