A couple has been arrested for allegedly breaking into a home and taking a 4-year-old boy from the child’s parents.
It happened over the weekend in the town of Canaan.
Deputies quickly found the child and returned him to his parents.
Laci Belanger said this all started when she picked up her son from her mother’s house.
“He was kind of hitting me in the face,” Belanger said. “And I said, ‘No, buddy. Enough. You gotta go home.’”
Belanger said that when she, her husband and her son Ely got home, the phone rang.
“My mother asked me, ‘Did you hit your son?’ And I was just appalled,” Belanger said. “I said, ‘Why would you think that?’”
Belanger says through the phone she could hear her sister and her sister’s boyfriend screaming. She hung up, but minutes later she said the two were outside their door.
“My sister said, ‘If you don’t open this door, I’m going to break the door down,’” Belanger said.
Seconds later, they allegedly kicked in the door.
Belanger says when her sister grabbed her son, she and her husband blocked the door.
She says her sister, Emily Hartley, and her sister’s boyfriend, Justin Baker, then broke a back window and left with Ely. Deputies later found Ely back at his grandmother’s house and brought him home.
Hartley and Baker are out on bail but didn’t want to talk to CBS 13. Investigators said Hartley told them she suspected “something bad might be going on at his home” but had no proof.
“It’s absurd,” Belanger said. “I would never lay a hand on my child, and neither would my husband.”
The chief deputy says the couple they arrested went about this all wrong.
Hartley and Baker face several charges, including burglary, assault and criminal restraint. If convicted, they face up to 10 years in prison.
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