Woman Arrested On Kidnapping Charges Claims She Was Looking For Parents [Video]

A 23-year-old woman was arrested and is in custody at the Dallas County Jail for allegedly kidnapping two children on New Year’s Eve from a Dallas thrift store. The accused woman claimed Friday that she looked for their parents, and that they followed her. During a jailhouse interview with the Dallas Morning News and KXAS-TV (NBC5), Brianah Blount said her goal was to get the children, a 7-year-old boy and his 4-year-old sister, to police officers.

“I know I’m a good person,” she said.

Blount said she walked into the thrift store Wednesday evening to use their phone to call her family in Louisiana. She said she then saw the unsupervised children at the store. Police said in an arrest warrant affidavit that the two young kids’ father had left them unattended while he tried on clothes. Blount said she tried looking for the child’s parents, but wasn’t successful. Then she said she was stifled every time she intended to use the phone to call someone.

It was unclear how Blount wound up at the thrift store, and how she got from the thrift store to the apartment complex more than four miles away, where police found her with the children after a neighbor, April Hobbs, called 911. Hobbs said she knows Blount, and saw the kids outside her apartment standing with her.

“The little girl came and jumped into my arms and was like, ‘I’m scared, I’m scared, I don’t know where my dad is,'” said Hobbs.

She said she’s never seen the kids before in the close-knit community, and she knew Blount wasn’t their mother.

“Something in my chest said something wasn’t right,” she said as reported by Fox4News.

Blount said she did not live at the apartment complex, but knew people she could trust there. She said the kids “followed” her out of the store, and that she didn’t kidnap anyone. Blount’s mother said her daughter is a struggling single mother who recently lost her job.

“I believe that she genuinely wanted to help those kids and she went about it the wrong way and acted on impulse without thinking this through,” the mother said. “But never ever would she ever hurt anyone, much less these kids.”

Blount’s 3-year-old son is now with his father. Her mother said the charges against her daughter are “not her.”

“We would like for the public to keep an open mind and read everything and not just automatically think the worst,” she said. “Sometimes, good people do things for the right reasons, and it can be manipulated to appear to be something it’s not.”

Police said the two children are now in the care of their father.

Read about another recent kidnapping attempt in California, as reported by the Inquisitr, where an older brother saved his sister by grabbing her arm as a man tried to take the child away.