TORPY: Full video makes iffy child snatching case more questionable

“This could have been a whole different situation if that mother didn’t fight back to get that child,” the Acworth police spokesman told TV stations. “Who knows what we could’ve been dealing with. We could’ve been dealing with an injured child or even worse, the death of a child.”

Cases of strangers kidnapping young kids are incredibly rare. And you’d have to be out of your mind to try and pull off something like that in a well-lit store with lots of shoppers and security cameras everywhere. Patel is not that. He’s 20-year Cobb resident who is well-liked by neighbors. He does have a criminal record, a 2013 conviction to a kickback scheme connected to a computer contract with Atlanta Public Schools.

Well, Patel’s attorney, Ashleigh Merchant, finally got the videos, some 25 days into his incarceration.

Police pooh-poohed a five-minute clip Merchant initially released, calling it “partial.”

The clip was made from 20 separate videos — 10 hours worth. I watched every one. If I was a juror, there’s no way I’d convict him of attempted kidnapping.

Merchant has gone on the attack, saying in court motions that Acworth police played fast and loose with the facts to get an arrest warrant and then went public “to poison the jury pool.” On top of that, she said other prisoners are threatening Patel. Those accused of child crimes don’t do well in jail.

Credit: Contributed

Credit: Contributed

Also, Merchant says the Cobb County District Attorney’s office has stonewalled, refusing to give her evidence and quickly indicting Patel without giving him a preliminary hearing where she could cross examine the investigating officer. Or get bond.

In fact, Merchant did not get the videos from the state. She got them from Walmart.

Merchant summed up the situation in a court filing: “This case presents a classic example of the horrible spiral of events that happen when the police do not adequately investigate facts before an arrest, misrepresent facts to a magistrate judge to get an arrest warrant, falsely accuse a citizen with crimes designed to ensure he cannot receive a bond, and then falsely sensationalize and misrepresent the facts in the news media in order to turn the public against one of its citizens. In a matter of minutes, the police in this case destroyed the reputation of Mr. Patel, a longtime Cobb County resident, and his family.”

The part of the video showing the attempted “kidnapping” is about five seconds, and shows Patel leaning in toward Caroline Miller and her two young children, who were riding on a motorized cart for disabled people. Patel had been wandering the store for about five minutes when he asked her where he could find Tylenol.

Patel says he thought the toddler was falling when his mother was pointing, so he reached for the boy. Merchant says her client thought Miller was disabled, hence his urgency to help. But Miller has told TV her kids just like to ride on the cart.

She initially spoke with at least two TV stations but declined to talk with me when I approached her last week.

Credit: WSB-TV

Credit: WSB-TV

Another man who was about 6 feet away from the incident briefly turned to glance at whatever happened, but then resumed his own shopping. Seconds later, that man also stepped forward to attend to one of Miller’s children, apparently also thinking the girl was falling out of the cart.

Patel stopped to talk to that shopper and walked past Miller. Patel got a Walmart employee to show him the Tylenol. The two of them walked past Miller. Again.

And then, more than two minutes later, Patel walked past Miller a third time and stopped to talk with her for several seconds, showing her the Tylenol.

He then went to a checkout kiosk for more than a minute before moving to a second checkout because the first was busy. Another minute later, he started walking out the door and talked to the Walmart doorman for 30 seconds before strolling to his car. Tick tock, another minute.

He then drove away, eight minutes after the incident.

Acworth police later told the media that Patel “fled” the scene in what would have to be the slowest getaway ever.

As Patel was checking out, Miller alerted a Walmart employee, telling the worker — the one who helped Patel find the Tylenol — that he tried to snatch her son. Miller had called her husband or father during this time. The two of them arrived just after Patel left.

Credit: Courtesy

Credit: Courtesy

One thing that might have worked against Patel — he seems to be touchy.

The video shows Patel patting a woman employee on the shoulder and waving at her after entering the store, presumably thanking her for pointing him toward the Tylenol. And the woman who later walked him to the Tylenol told Walmart security that Patel was “extremely talkative. He started rubbing my shoulder and said: ‘I love you.’”

When Patel was ”fleeing” and talking to the Walmart doorman on the way out, he touched that man’s shoulder.

Three former veteran prosecutors who saw edited versions of the videos thought it was a flimsy case.

“Where’s the crime?” former DeKalb County DA J. Tom Morgan told my colleague, Shaddi Abusaid. “This is why a prosecutor should never rush to judgment.”

The prosecutors, who quickly indicted Patel to keep him locked up, almost certainly saw these same videos. So did police. And they waited three days to arrest him.

Why are prosecutors playing hardball? One can only imagine.

Sonya Allen was elected Cobb’s DA last November. In her inauguration speech, Allen said: “There will be difficult days ahead. We will face complex cases with hard choices and sometimes public scrutiny.”

This is one of those days.