A man who allegedly kidnapped his 5-year-old son from a St. Louis hospital was quickly tracked to a hotel outside Chicago after making a series of taunting calls and texts to his estranged wife, authorities said.
Porter Stone, who has congestive heart failure and is a high-priority candidate for a heart transplant, was found unharmed about 3 a.m. Wednesday at the Baymont Inn & Suites, 12801 S. Cicero Ave., in Alsip, authorities said. They said the boy was abducted without two of his “required and prescribed medications” or equipment for an intravenous drug that improved the boy’s heart function.
His mother, Tiffany Stone, was “very terrified and very shocked” by the alleged kidnapping and worried that her son’s life might be in danger because of his medical condition, said Christopher Heise, her Texas divorce attorney.
Police arrested the boy’s father, Jeffrey Stone, 33; paternal grandmother, Rhonda Marie Matthews, 59; and an aunt, Heather Minton, 37, in the hotel room. The three, who are all from California, were charged by a state prosecutor in Missouri with kidnapping, endangering the welfare of a child and interference with child custody.
The race to find Porter, who has a disease that reduces his heart’s pumping ability, began Tuesday after he was discharged to his parents at 4 p.m. fromSt. LouisChildren’s Hospital, said hospital spokeswoman Abby Wuellner.
Jeffrey Stone apparently told the boy’s mother that he was going with Porter to pick up the boy’s prescriptions at the hospital pharmacy while she went down to her car, Wuellner said. Moments later, Stone allegedly called his wife and told her “he was taking his son,” police said.
Investigators who learned of the boy’s health problems quickly got to work.
“I think everybody kind of kicked into gear as quickly as they could when we heard the news from doctors at this hospital,” said St. Louis assistant circuit attorney Christine Krug, who supervises the circuit’s child abuse and domestic violence section. “Any case involving a child just pulls at everybody’s heart.”
During the 11 hours Porter was gone, Stone repeatedly called and texted his estranged wife, telling her he had their son but would not let her to speak to him, authorities said. An investigator wrote in an affidavit that police determined the cellphone wasn’t being used in Missouri.
Authorities declined to confirm whether they tracked Stone to the Alsip hotel using his cellphone. But local officials said the Secret Service, which is often brought in to assist with cellphone tracking, helped in the investigation.
The boy’s parents, who were married seven years ago and also have a 1-year-old daughter, are in the middle of a divorce in Texas, court records show. Tiffany Stone, who lives in St. Joseph, Mo., was granted temporary custody of both children in December, records show.
The couple had bounced around the country over the past five years, living in Texas, Oregon, Kansas and Missouri, records show. Jeffrey Stone filed for divorce in April. His wife, in a counter-petition, accused him of adultery and “other marital misconduct.”
In an affidavit, Jeffrey Stone listed his only source of income as public aid from the state of Kansas.
“We never thought in our wildest dreams that he would do anything like this,” Porter’s maternal grandfather, Matthew Fife, told WGN-TV.
Stone and Matthews are being held on $1 million arrest warrants and could appear for an extradition hearing in Maywood as early as Thursday, officials said.
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