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The 6-year-old was bending down as she picked up boxes to discard outside her house in Hamilton, Ohio, when a man approached her from behind and touched her private parts, surveillance video recorded last week shows.
Baffled by the incident, the girl walked a few steps toward the home’s front door before the stranger grabbed her by the left arm and dragged her in the opposite direction.
But the girl’s cries prevented the man from taking her any farther.
Seconds later, the man let the girl’s wrist go and swiftly walked away from the scene, the footage shows.
Deric N. McPherson, 33, has since been charged with two counts of kidnapping, one count of gross sexual imposition and two counts of unlawful restraint, according to Butler County court records. In 2014, McPherson was charged with rape, court records show. A grand jury dismissed the case.
On the evening of Aug. 23, the girl’s mother was putting away groceries in the kitchen and agreed to let her child throw some boxes in the blue trash can in front of her house, she told The Washington Post. The Post is not identifying the parents because the incident involves a minor.
“The trash can is literally 1o feet [away] from my front door …” she told The Post. “It can happen in the blink of an eye.”
About a minute after walking outside, the girl came back into the house yelling for help, her mother said.
“ ‘Somebody touched me!’ ” she recalled her daughter crying. “ ‘Somebody tried to take me!’ ”
The girl’s parents first chased the man on foot before the father hopped in his car and followed McPherson through side streets, the mother told The Post. With 911 on the line, he eventually cornered McPherson in an empty lot. The Hamilton Police Department arrested McPherson a few minutes past 6 p.m., according to the arrest report.
If the girl’s parents had not sat down with her to have the “stranger danger” conversation, as the girl’s mom put it — where they told her that “if anybody ever tries to touch or take you, scream, bite, kick [and] make as much noise as possible” — she does not think her daughter would be safely home today.
McPherson is being held at the Butler County Jail on $35,000 bail, records show. Court records do not list an attorney for him.
Source link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/29/ohio-man-charged-kidnapping-girl-screams/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=wp_national