AVON, Ind. (Feb. 10, 2014)– Avon police arrested a man Sunday morning, accused of abducting two women and a baby at gunpoint from the Avon Walmart parking lot.
It happened Feb. 6 as one of the women was returning her shopping cart.
“We were overwhelmed with a sense of urgency that we needed to get out there and try to find this individual,” said Avon Police Detective Sean Stoops.
The women told detectives that a man drove them to a nearby apartment complex, threatening to kill the baby if they didn’t comply. They said they were raped, then forced to drive to their home in Clermont. A man and an infant were inside the home.
“The other parties were bound and more assaults took place and eventually the suspect took several items from the home and vehicle and left,” said Stoops.
Detectives tracked the stolen cell phones to a general area in Indianapolis, and IMPD officers saturated the streets. Officers eventually found the stolen car at 4 a.m. Sunday in Michael Parrish’s driveway and called the Avon Police Department.
“He was already detained and secure,” said Detective Stoops. “He was visibly upset. I think he knew that he had been caught.”
Parrish is now being investigated for similar crimes in Indianapolis, including one Saturday, Feb. 8 at Tropicana Bar on West Washington Street. A woman said she was punched in the face when getting out of her car and told to stay down or he’d shoot. The man took off after people noticed the commotion. He dropped his cell phone, and the police report says the phone was logged in to Parrish’s Facebook page.
Connecting these cases makes things complicated, and that’s one of the reasons these incidents have been kept quiet.
“There was a threat made by the individual that if the females did contact the police, he may come back and do harm to them, so we wanted to protect them, number one,” said Stoops. “Number two, we wanted to make sure that if there was a possibility he was still driving this vehicle, we wanted him to have a false sense of security that it was OK to keep driving it and in this case it worked out for us.”
Parrish has his initial hearing scheduled for early Tuesday afternoon.
FOX59 is not releasing Parrish’s photo as it could potentially harm the investigation.
