Kidnapping, accomplice

Today's highlight makes for quite a story.

This afternoon one of my guys (X) got a call from his girlfriend. She said she found a baby in a shopping cart in a store parking lot and took it home. (What?!? Yeah, I know, but just bear with me.)

He called one of the E-6s (one of the guys not selected for the acting platoon sergeant position) and asked what to do. E-6 said he needed to go take care of the situation.

E-6 then told me, and my response was, "NO." (X is one of the guys getting kicked out for marijuana.) "YOU need to call the police and meet them at wherever that baby is to explain the situation."

I then got on the phone and told the commander the situation. By the time we spoke to X again, somebody had come and gotten the baby. Who? "I don't know." Ask your girlfriend. "She went to work." Can't you call her? "No, I'm not going to bother her at work. This ain't my problem."

And so began a two and a half ordeal that included the me, the E-6, my new E-5 acting platoon sergeant, the first sergeant, and the commander, all trying to figure out what happened, where this baby was, if the police had been contacted, whether Child and Protective Services had been notified, and what the heck was wrong with this soldier who wouldn't tell us what was going on.

We tried to explain it to him -- taking a child without telling someone what's going one is kidnapping, and by not doing anything about it you an accomplice (something about "carnal knowledge"). But he kept saying he wasn't involved.

His assumption was that CPS had come and gotten it, but police always accompany CPS when they do that, and there had been no dispatch for something like that. When I called CPS, they wouldn't tell me whether or not they had received a report (privacy laws), so I had to just make a report with the spotty (to say the least) information I had.

The commander had X come in and draw up a sworn statement; it was a real mess. CPS and I had several conversations that evening for situation updates, until about 8:30.

Then I got a phone call from E-5 acting platoon sergeant. He told me that X got a text message from his girlfriend saying the baby was the neighbor's, and that it had all been a joke.

Astounding.

Simply ... astounding.