By Kaley Johnson
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
MANSFIELD, Texas — Officers in Mansfield found a girl missing out of Brownsville after an Amber Alert was sent out Saturday, according to police.
The police department released body camera footage of the girl’s rescue and the suspect’s arrest on the department’s Facebook page Sunday evening.
The 13-year-old was reportedly abducted in Brownsville Saturday evening, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety. Information was sent out about the suspect and his car. Mansfield police saw the suspect’s car on Main Street in Mansfield, according to the police department.
“As our community was sleeping, our team was in high gear developing an arrest and rescue plan,” Mansfield police wrote on the Facebook post.
Brownsville is located in the Rio Grande Valley, about 520 miles from Mansfield.
The video shows multiple officers descend on a car by the light of their flashlights and remove an 18-year-old suspect from the driver’s seat. The suspect had fallen asleep and officers developed a plan to get the girl out of the car without injury. The officers did not know if there were weapons inside the car or not, so a sergeant “strategically placed himself between the suspect and the girl to make sure she was safe,” the department said.
“See for yourself how the plan was executed and the suspect was placed in handcuffs without incident and minimal force,” the post says.
In the video, the suspect is pulled from the car and put onto the ground. Officers yell for him to put his hands behind his back, and he is handcuffed. The video has been altered to blur out the girl in the passenger seat.
The girl was rescued safely and reunited with her family.
“A huge shout out to Sergeant Raines, Officer Hernandez, Officer Koenig, and Officer Killian for the diligent police work, using their investigative skills to locate the bad guy and rescue this child,” Mansfield police said in a Facebook post. “This teamwork reinforces the need for all community members to be on the lookout when alerts are publicized, even when they are far away from our hometown.”
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