A Georgia high school student was arrested for allegedly abducting a toddler outside of his family’s home in November.
Dieu Doumdje, 17, was arrested by DeKalb County School Police Thursday and booked into DeKalb County Jail on charges of theft by motor vehicle.
“The Clarkston Police Department is still actively investigating this incident and conducting interviews to determine if there are other suspects involved,” police spokesman Clarkston, Sgt. Dustin Bulcher said in a statement.
The arrest is the latest development in the mysterious ordeal of 1-year-old Blaise Barnett, whose disappearance in November caused panic and look for vigilance for the child, it was only 36 hours later that he woke up, fast asleep in an SUV in the driveway about a mile from his home.
Bulcher told The Daily Beast on Friday that the car theft appeared to be random and that Doumdje, who had been arrested earlier, “had no acquaintance with the family.”
Blaise’s parents were unloading their Ford Explorer with the engine still running at around 1 a.m. on November 10, when they returned outside to retrieve the boy and discovered that their vehicle was missing and The boy had disappeared, police said.
The abandoned vehicle was found several hours after it was allegedly stolen, but Blaise and his carseat were nowhere to be found, according to police.
Blaise reappeared in the midst of a frenzied search, when a woman approached police about an infant she found in her car parked in her driveway less than an hour from Barnetts’ home. 0.6 km, police said.
For months, it was unclear who placed him there until police found fingerprints in Barnetts’ car that linked Doumdje to the case.
“We were able to identify multiple fingerprints inside the vehicle, but only one is not ruled out,” says Bulcher.
According to Bulcher, the fingerprint in question was found on a piece of mail inside the vehicle and this week, police were “hit” by allegedly linking Doumdje’s fingerprints to the stolen vehicle. Police received an arrest warrant on January 12 and arrested the teenager a day later.
The arrest is just the latest development in the boy’s strange disappearance and reappearance. Before he was found, a group including the toddler’s father’s cousin had been hunting door-to-door for Blaise when two of them are believed to have fatally shot 60-year-old Aziz Hassan in Clarkston that night. Blaise is missing.
According to a police report obtained by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Hassan’s family members said the slain man thought the search party was trying to steal the rim of his car and opened fire. supposedly returned by Delarius Miller, 38, and Santana. Miller, 34. Both of them are currently facing charges over his death.
Clarkston Police said the investigation was still ongoing as they probed into whether others were involved in the incident.
