commentary by Patrick H. Moore
We humans have habits, needs, desires and obsessions. One powerful drive is the maternal nurturing instinct. It can manifest as the need/desire to care for creatures such as dogs or birds or even fish or, of course, it can focus on the age-old desire to have, raise and nurture a child.
Sometimes, it can manifest as a powerful desire to have your own child. But what if, for whatever set of reasons, you are not in a position to get pregnant, yet someone close to you is preparing to give birth. Based on recent empirical evidence, in some cases, the combination of your own unrequited desire because you are not having a child, combined with frustration or envy of that party who is, may lead you actually execute a plot to take that other party’s child. We saw that in the case of the fetus thief Julie Corey of Worcester, Mass, who actually strangled her 8-months pregnant best friend, before performing a sort of “grass-roots” C-Section and absconding with the living fetus.
A bit weird, you say? I’d say it goes well beyond weird. I would say an act such as that of Julie Corey is “surpassingly strange”. And now, a few weeks later, we have another instance in which an envious woman, desirous of having her own child, no doubt believing it would fill an otherwise irredeemable void, has stolen someone else’s newborn child. In this case, the child “belonged” to her own step-sister.
(This surprising event took place in Beloit in my own beloved home state of Wisconsin, a mere two hours from where I followed the slow progress of the moon down on the farm during my early formative years.)
The AP reports:
An hour after a woman reported her newborn son missing from a Wisconsin home, police were questioning her step-sister — found with a prosthetic pregnancy belly, baby clothes and a stroller, but no baby, according to court documents.
It was more than 24 hours after Kayden Powell went missing before authorities discovered the infant, less than a week old, in a plastic storage crate outside an Iowa gas station, miraculously alive and well despite frigid temperatures.
According to court documents, Kristen Smith of Denver, who appears to go by multiple names and has had run-ins with the law in multiple states, had pretended to be pregnant (presumably with the help of the prosthetic pregnancy belly, whatever that is). She traveled to Wisconsin to pay her respects to her step-sister and her husband and their newborn son, Kayden Powell. However, Kristen did much more than merely pay her respects to the parents and their offspring. According to the court documents, at some point during her visit, Kristen actually snatched the infant child from his bassinet as his parents slept. She then apparently took off driving southwest toward Iowa. When the police closed in on her close to 30 hours later on Friday morning, she allegedly abandoned the infant, who she fortunately left bundled up in blankets.
The discovery of the infant shortly after 10 a.m. Friday near a Kum & Go gas station near Interstate 80 in West Branch, Iowa capped a frantic 24-hour-plus search that involved police officers in three states.
The search began right after Kayden Powell’s mother, Brianna Marshall, woke up at around 4:30 a.m. on Thursday and found her newborn missing from her uncle Bennett’s house where she and the baby’s father, Bruce Powell, had been staying. According to the police affidavit, Brianna phoned the authorities immediately and reported that Kayden had vanished.
Although Brianna Marshall didn’t want to believe that Kristen Smith had taken her child, partly at her uncle Bennett’s insistence, she told the police that Smith had left the house a couple of hours earlier to return to Colorado. Coincidentally, at some point while the police were at Bennett’s house, Kristen, who may have been suffering the pangs of a guilty conscience, serendipitously called on her cellphone. Apparently after some prompting by the police, she came up with the story that Brianna Marshall and the baby’s father were planning on heading to Denver themselves the following day (Saturday) where they were all going to live together. Kristen stated that she had Kayden’s clothes in her car but that she didn’t have the boy.
The police refused to buy it and told her to pull over for questioning. Shortly thereafter, an officer met her at the Kum & Go gas station in West Branch, Iowa. It turned out she had an outstanding Texas warrant (these troubled types sometimes do) which gave them the right to arrest her. At this juncture, according to the affidavit, Kristen held her ground and denied any knowledge of Kayden’s whereabouts.
Then the investigators went to work. A search of her cellphone revealed emails in which she announced that she had given birth on Feb. 5th. The picture became progressively less muddy when a search of Kristen’s Facebook page turned up postings in which she claimed she was pregnant.
It was clear that this woman desperately wanted to be pregnant. She certainly didn’t appear to be “in a family way”, however, and when a pregnancy test was administered, it came back negative, according to U.S. Attorney John Vaudreuil.
West Branch is about 180 miles southwest of the Town of Beloit. That night temperatures dipped below zero and they were still in the single digits Friday morning when the Chief found Kayden.
Dozens of officers immediately began searching for the child at possible stopping points along Smith’s route from Wisconsin to Iowa. Thinking it through, West Branch Police Chief Mike Horihan appears to have come to the conclusion that the infant could well be close at hand; there was no obvious reason to suspect that Kristen had abandoned it prior to being questioned by law enforcement. On the other hand, it made perfect sense that she would have hidden it somewhere after she realized she was a target. Chief Horihan decided to check the area around a BP station about 500 yards from the Kum-and-Go station where Smith was arrested. Bingo! He heard a baby’s cries and discovered Kayden in a closed storage crate next to the station. The chief was delighted to discover that the newborn was responsive and healthy.
BP station manager Jay Patel was also delighted by the good news but he was also sobered by the magnitude of what the infant had been through. “I had tears in my eyes,” he said, recalling his reaction to the police chief told him the news.
“Surprisingly with the weather the way it was, he was surprisingly healthy,” Police Chief Horihan said. “To be honest with you, that’s not what I expected.”
The baby was reunited with his parents on Friday.
Kristen Smith reportedly faces life in prison if convicted
She was interviewed again by law enforcement and this time, according to the affidavit, she admitted she had taken the baby and left him at the BP station.
* * * * *
Bennett, the baby’s great-uncle, was not nearly as magnanimous in his assessment of the whole situation as Police Chief Horihan and BP station owner Jay Patel. Bennett told The Associated Press he first met Smith on Thursday night, when he came home and found her, his mother and the baby’s mother and father in his house.
Bennett went to his room in the basement. When he woke up, the baby and Smith were gone.
It was pretty obvious what had happened and Bennett kept telling Brianna that Smith was the taker, but Marshall refused to believe it. The baby’s bassinet was 2 feet from the parents’ bed and Bennett reportedly found a paring knife on the ground next to it.
“I could have woke up to a bloody mess,” Bennett said.
(It’s hard to know what the paring knife means. It seems unlikely that Kristen Smith would have harmed the child but how can you know for sure?)
Unsurprisingly, Bennett said he hopes Smith gets locked up for life.
“You stole him like you’re stealing something from the grocery store,” the great-uncle said. “Nobody in their right mind should have thought of that.”
Federal prosecutors in the Western District of Wisconsin in Madison (ferociously tough judges abound) charged Smith with kidnapping Friday afternoon.
Bennett had more to say and he waxed almost poetically. “He’s strong. I’m glad that baby is still living instead of in a ditch somewhere on a strange highway.”
* * * * *
Oh, what a mess! This troubled young desperado is now in the most desperate trouble of her life, trouble she will never get out of. Although the Eastern District of Wisconsin is one the best Federal judicial districts in the country, the Western District still likes to “hang ‘em high”. I can easily imagine Kristen Smith getting life in Federal prison based on the kidnapping charge combined with a sea of child endangerment enhancements.