Police and the FBI are scouring the region for two men who kidnapped a 4-year-old boy after tying up his mother and a sibling in the their Fort Washington home late Wednesday then calling the father and demanding cash for the boy’s return.
Jose Benjamin Mejia was found about 12 hours after his 11 p.m. abduction in a Takoma Park neighborhood. Maria Madera’s teenage son, Daniel Dias, found the barefooted and scared child outside their home on the 200 block of Geneva Avenue.
Madera said she found a note on white paper pinned to Jose Mejia’s shirt which said “my dad” followed by his father’s cell phone number. She called the number – “hold onto him,” the father told Madera – gave her address and within five minutes her home was swarming with police.
The discovery put an end to the search for the boy, but the men who attacked the family remained at large as of Thursday evening.
Mejia’s mother was entering her home in the upper-middle-class neighborhood on the 9400 block of Sandy Creek Road when a man attacked her from behind, threw her on the floor and tied her and her child up, Prince George’s County police spokesman Henry Tippet said. Two other children were locked in a bedroom and a second man took Jose Mejia out of the house.
One of the attackers then called Jose Mejia’s father, demanding what police described as a “large sum of money.” The two men then fled with the child in a 1990s-model gold Cadillac with a vinyl top.
Police believe the attackers are likely familiar with the family; they knew the father’s cell phone number and his work habits – he was running one of multiple gas stations he owns in the area at the time of the kidnapping. Prince George’s County police, Maryland State Police and the FBI are examining all possible links and haven’t closed the doors on the attack being the work of gang members.
David Parker, who lives next door to Jose’s family, had a message to the kidnappers: “Money comes and goes, but this is a little kid’s life and children should not be involved in any of this.”
