Police body camera captures heart-stopping moment officers find kidnapped 8-year-old

From the moment that Crystal Merrill arrived for her overnight shift on May 18 at the 911 call and dispatch center in Fort Worth, Texas, the phone would not stop ringing.

A few hours later, however, at 2 a.m., a 911 call from a good Samaritan gave Merrill pause. She didn’t know then that it was a tip that would play a key role in the case. Fort Worth Police Sgt. Amelia Heise was the detective on call on that Saturday night when the report came in about a child being abducted.

When they interviewed the mother, police said, she told them a man had approached her and her daughter twice. The mother said that when the stranger returned, he grabbed her daughter and shoved her into his car. The mother was able to give the police a rough description of the suspect, and they had images of his car on the door camera's surveillance footage. Based on that, police were able to quickly get in touch with vehicle experts to determine the car’s make and model.

Forest Hill police officers responded to Woodspring Suites, an extended-stay hotel about 7 miles from the street where the girl had been taken. They spoke to a man in Room 333 and even went inside, but reported that they had not seen a child and left. “If this guy’s looking out the window, I’m not trying to let him see that we’re rolling around,” the officer says in the video.

The girl told officers that the suspect had forced her to hide and threatened to kill her family if she made a sound, police said. She had stayed quiet the first time officers had come to the door, but this hadn’t worked the second time. “I went straight in and I just hugged my babies,” Merrill said. “It was just a lot because like I said, you could just [keep] thinking, ‘Oh, that could’ve been me.’ And it was good to know my babies were at home.”

Meeting with the family of the abducted child, Nealy Cox said, she couldn’t help but imagine what the mother had gone through.

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