Michelle Allery had just strapped her two toddlers, ages 3 and 4, into their car seats when she went inside to get her 11-month-old. It was about 5 a.m. Thursday, and the Dunseith, N.D., mom had to drop her kids at day care and be at work in Rugby, N.D., more than 30 miles away, in an hour. The baby was already bundled, so she picked him up and put a blanket over him. It was a matter of seconds before she was back outside to see her 2001 Pontiac Grand Am on the move.
“My car started pulling out, like, fast,” the 27-year-old mother said. Adrenalin rushed through her as she thought of her kids. Right away, she put down her baby and went after the car. At the end of the alley, the driver stopped and dropped her 3-year-old girl, Halen Davis, out the window. Crying and terrified, she landed on her backside. Allery picked up her girl, went back to her home, which sits next to Wayne’s Food Pride grocery store and told her boyfriend to call 911.
“I was, like, screaming at the tops of my lungs,” she said. “I was, like, really hysterical.” She grabbed the keys to another car and went looking for her 4-year-old, Jason Davis. “My main thought was, ‘My son is in there,’” she said. “I just had to get him.”
A few blocks away, near Dunseith High School, Allery spotted the Grand Am’s taillights and caught up to the stolen car. She found her crying son, who had been let out in a parking lot. That’s when she confronted the driver, who was naked and had blood all over him. She said he kept apologizing to her, saying, “Auntie, it’s me! Auntie, it’s me!” “I didn’t even know this guy,” she said. “And he was sitting there calling me ‘Auntie.’”
Rolette County deputies arrested the driver at a baseball diamond near the high school, where he had driven the car into a dugout and got stuck up on a fence. The driver, a 16-year-old from Grand Forks who was visiting relatives in the area, was taken to a hospital in Belcourt, N.D., where he tried to escape from custody. “Little, wiry, skinny guy, he bolted through the door and got caught” after a brief foot pursuit.
The teen, who was not identified, is being held in juvenile detention in Devils Lake, pending a hearing next week. He has not been charged but could be tried for numerous offenses in juvenile court, including kidnapping, reckless endangerment, auto theft, driving without a licence and underage drinking.
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