El Paso police arrested the Texas mother of a four-year-old boy found wandering in Mexico late February. They believe the woman abandoned her child.
On Tuesday, officers took Ruby Esmeralda Gonzales, 25, into custody on a charge of child abandonment with imminent danger, according to an El Paso Police Department news release.
The El Paso Police Department’s Crimes Against Persons unit released that the young child was found alone in the city of Juarez, Mexico, on February 22. A police investigation revealed that Gonzalez, who lives in El Paso, allegedly took the child to Juarez on that day in February and left him in an abandoned building. She then returned to Texas on that same date, according to the news release. Officers later identified the child as a United States citizen.
It appears that the Mexican police found the boy alone in Juarez on February 22 and law enforcement tried to identify him but were only able to ascertain that “Luis” might be his first name, according to KXAN. Because of the four-year-old’s fluency in English, authorities suspected he might be an American citizen, which he was as it turned out.
The El Paso Times reported that El Paso law enforcement first learned about the boy last week from Mexican authorities when a supervisor in the El Paso Police Department’s Crimes Against Persons unit attended an Amber Alert seminar in Mexico City and heard about the child, said El Paso Police Department spokesman Sgt. Enrique Carrillo.
Subsequently, El Paso police sent out a media alert about the unidentified boy. Local news outlets posted photographs of the child asking for the public’s help in identifying him. El Paso police said that on Saturday, June 3, “after seeing photographs of the victim on local television stations, Gonzalez called police to report the kidnapping of the victim.”
Then, on Tuesday, officers took Gonzalez into custody, charging her with child abandonment. They booked her into the El Paso County Detention Facility on a $10,000 bond.
The boy remains in the care of social services in Juarez, according to the Times.
Now that the four-year-old has been identified, El Paso police cancelled their alert but said that detectives will continue to work with law enforcement agents in Juarez. They consider this an ongoing investigation.
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