A man is in police custody after he allegedly kidnapped a four year girl from her family's backyard.
The incident happened around 5:30 pm Monday afternoon in Ewa Beach. The girl and her 5-year-old brother were playing in their backyard when a stranger that lived nearby came to the backyard's chain linked fence. Witness say that 37-year-old Ian K. Coen took the little girl and brought her to a nearby 7-eleven store on Fort Weaver road to buy her candy. The girl's 5-year-old brother told their father what happened. The father then called on family and friends to help find his daughter.
Family and friends set out to find the girl who had been gone for about 20 minutes. Family friend, Puna Timas heard what had happened and went looking to find his hanai-niece.
"One of our other friends caught them in the store...he grabbed the baby, took the baby home and then the dude ran away...it was a matter of finding him before he did that to somebody else's baby," said Timas.
Coen then went to Ewa Mart down the street when Timas and another family friend tried to confront Coen. "I stopped the car and we started to approach him to tell him to stop..wait until cops came and what not. He backed up into the car over there where he tripped and fell down and so I grabbed him and waited for the cops to come by."
Neighbor and mother of three, Melinda Seward says that something like this is rare around the Ewa Beach neighborhood and that this incident makes her more cautious as a parent.
"We all watch out each other but I don't know where this guy came from, out of no where," she said. "It's kind of weird now, cannot even trust our own neighborhood, you know what I mean...that's sad."
Coen was arrested for first degree kidnapping. He remains in police custody and has not yet been charged.
This is my work and you can see additional coverage of this story at Hawaii News Now.
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