She told CNN: “I kind of had to look at the phone – was this real? At
first it kind of scared me.”
Describing the night her son was kidnapped, Mrs Champion said she had five
children under the age of four at the time, and had asked Tanner to look
after Miguel, who was her youngest at the time, because she was struggling
to cope.
The two families were close, sharing Thanksgiving and Christmas meals, and she
had no reason to suspect that he would not be safe with the teenager.
“At that time, I trusted her, I knew her,” she said. “I was
having hardship at the time. I asked her to watch him overnight, and when I
came back… they were gone.”
Tanner, who was a high school student, did not turn up to her classes that
morning, and her mother told Mrs Champion-Morin that she had left the state.
Deputy Cunningham said that the state’s child welfare agency began
investigating Tanner after receiving a report that she had been neglecting
her children and singling out an eight-year-old for abuse.
When investigators spoke to Tanner, she allegedly gave contradictory reports
about the child’s background, first saying that he was hers, then that he
was the son of her brother or another person.
Deputy Cunningham said: “She admitted that she provided misleading
information, which certainly supports our belief that she kidnapped the
child.”
The little boy could now be returned to his family by the end of the week,
once blood tests prove definitively that he is Miguel.
Mrs Champion-Morin said that she had never given up hope that she would find
him. “I always wondered every night. I dreamed and prayed on it,”
she said.
“I’m going to let him know I love him with all my heart … and any
questions he has, I will answer them. It will be hard. We will probably have
to go to a psychiatrist together.”
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