by Shia Kapos and Eric Ferkenhoff, Chicago Tribune
CHICAGO — The search for a 16-month-old girl believed abducted Christmas Eve from a crowded Chicago bus station expanded nationwide yesterday, as police sent out urgent bulletins.
“I just really wish you would have a heart and a mind to bring her home where she belongs, with her mother, her sister and her father,” Marcella Anderson, 21, said at a news conference yesterday as she again pleaded for the safe return of her daughter, Jasmine Anderson. “It’s just the worst thing to take a baby on Christmas Eve, the worst present you could ever get.”
Anderson said the woman who befriended her at the Greyhound bus station “had a warm, friendly face. She just didn’t seem like she could take a baby.”
Speaking by telephone from the family’s apartment in Milwaukee, the girls’ father, Gregory Knowles, 21, said, “I don’t know what kind of person would want to do something like this.”
Police said they have interviewed witnesses who corroborated the mother’s account.
Authorities categorized the case as a kidnapping, distributed 10,000 fliers and fielded calls from as far away from Arizona.
Anderson said she and her daughters, Jasmine, and Alesia, 3, were headed home to Milwaukee for Christmas. The three, who already had flown to Chicago from St. Louis, were all tired, their mother said.
“Jasmine was restless,” Anderson said. “Alesia hadn’t had a nap and was having a fit.”
A woman approached Anderson and offered help.
“She said, ‘Your baby is beautiful,’ ” Anderson said.
The woman said she was a mother who understood the struggles of traveling with children, Anderson added. The woman suggested Anderson cash in her bus tickets and ride to Milwaukee in the woman’s green van.
“I should have turned her down,” Anderson said.
While waiting in line to turn in the tickets, Anderson said, she let the woman, who identified herself as “Christine” or “Christina,” hold Jasmine.
The woman had told Anderson she was in the station to pick up her college-age daughter. “She was walking back and forth,” apparently looking for the right bus, Anderson said.
The woman then began to walk away, so Anderson called out for her to give Jasmine back. “But she just kept walking,” Anderson said.
Police said finding the girl unharmed is their top priority.
“We’re hoping the woman will see the anguish of this mother and turn the child over,” said Joe Gandurski, deputy chief of detectives. “This touches every detective with a family. ... We want to have a happy ending to this.”
Police said FBI agents also have joined the investigation.
Police made a composite drawing of the suspect and described the woman as white or Hispanic with a tattoo on her neck in script.
She also is described as 35 to 40 years old, 5 feet 2 to 5 feet 4, with blue eyes and blond hair with dark roots, and wearing a black, leather coat, yellow shirt and white gym shoes.
Jasmine was wearing a pink hooded coat, a light-blue sweat suit and white gym shoes.
“I don’t know what my life would be like without her,” Anderson said.