Alabama native Carlethia “Carlee” Nichole Russell, who disappeared 49 hours after calling authorities and reporting a child wondering Sunday, July 16, on the street of I-459 in Alabama at 9:34 p.m., is gradually becoming a suspect instead of her initial victim of kidnapping claims.
According to cops, before the mysterious incident, Carlethia watched a child abduction movie titled “Taken,” making Google searches about Amber Alert, and searched to see if she was too old to be a victim of child abduction. She also searched “how to take money from a register without being caught and made several incriminating searches that suggest that she plotted the incident for attention or money.
However, authorities are not concluding anything now, they are still allowing Carlee to recover from the supposed trauma before they proceed with further interrogations.
Details via the New York Post;
The Alabama woman who went missing for 49 hours last week had searched for one-way bus tickets to Nashville, details about Amber alerts and the Liam Neeson film “Taken” on the day she vanished, police said.
Hoover Police Chief Nick Derzis told reporters Wednesday officers still don’t know exactly what happened in the time Carlethia “Carlee” Nichole Russell vanished on July 13, and they are waiting to interview her again.
“That’s the $100 question, we don’t know what happened after she got out of her car,” Derzis said. “Everything else is unknown.”
Russell, 25, disappeared after she called 911 to report a toddler wandering the I-459 in Alabama at 9:34 p.m.
Derzis said on the day of the disappearance, Russell looked up the film “Taken”, a movie where Neeson plays a retired CIA agent hunting down his daughter’s abductors after they kidnap her in France.
She also looked up, “How to take money from a register without being caught,” as well as info for one-way bus tickets from Birmingham, Alabama, to Nashville.
Records also showed how in the days leading up to the incident, Russell had made several notable searches on her phone about Amber Alerts — the child abduction emergency notification system, including if she was too old to be the subject of one.
“We want to know the truth,” he added.
Derzis said that during their first interview with Russell, she claimed she was kidnapped by a man who jumped out of the trees in the highway and forced her into his car.
Police officers arrived five minutes after being dispatched and found Russell’s wig, cell phone and purse along the roadway, with an Apple Watch inside the bag.
Hoover Police said Tuesday night that they could not find any evidence to back up her claim of a toddler wandering on the highway that night, which was her reason for stopping.
The nursing student then turned up two days later, with video surveillance showing her walking down the sidewalk home, alone.
If any of the police suspicions are correct, Carlee will soon be treated as a suspect and charged with a misdemeanor, false alarm to a public safety agency, and more. She could serve up to one year in prison and pay a fine of $1000.
Meanwhile, her boyfriend, who was once supportive, has decided it is time to move on.
The boyfriend of the Alabama woman who disappeared from a highway, causing a frantic manhunt, before mysteriously re-appearing at home two days later has wiped all trace of her from his social media.
Thomar Latrell Simmons’ Facebook page, once filled with glamorous photos of him and Carlee Russell smiling together, now shows barely any sign of the 25-year-old nursing student, including his assertion she was “fighting for her life for 48 hours” during the time she was missing.
The change came hours after Hoover police revealed they had found internet searches where Carlee had looked up a movie about kidnaps, whether she was too old to be the subject of an amber alert and the price of bus tickets to Nashville in the days before her disappearance.
“She was literally fighting for her life for 48 hours, so until she’s physically & mentally stable again she is not able to give any updates or whereabouts on her kidnapper at this very moment,” Simmons wrote in the since-deleted Sunday post.
What a strange story with so many unanswered questions.
