New Jersey authorities are continuing to search for a three-month-old baby girl Wednesday night after her 21-year-old father told police he threw her off a bridge.
East Orange police said Shamshiddin Abdur-Raheem abducted his daughter after punching her elderly grandmother on Tuesday afternoon.
Abdur-Raheem faces charges of kidnapping, attempted murder, aggravated assault and child endangerment in the abduction of his daughter Zara Malini-Lin Abdur-Raheem, The New Jersey Star-Ledger reported.
He is being held on $700,000 bail and is scheduled to appear in court on Thursday morning.
Seventeen divers, multiple boats and helicopters are searching the banks and waters of the Raritan River in Middlesex County, the newspaper reported.
Acting Attorney General Paula Dow said at a press conference Wednesday that Abdur-Raheem choked and punched the girl’s grandmother before kidnapping her about 4 p.m. on Tuesday.
When the elderly woman tried stop him from leaving the East Orange apartment, he tried to run the 60-year-old down with a minivan, Dow said.
The woman was treated for injuries at hospital but has now been released.
The man fled the scene and stopped at the Driscoll Bridge where he says he threw the girl from the span. He was arrested at a residence four hours later and allegedly confessed to the kidnapping and tossing the child from the bridge.
Dow said authorities are investigating why it took four hours from the time of the first 911 call for an Amber Alert to be issued.
An Amber Alert is a child abduction alert bulletin in the U.S. and Canada, as well as other countries, issued upon the suspected abduction of a child.
AMBER stands for “America’s Missing: Broadcasting Emergency Response” but was originally named for Amber Hagerman, a nine-year-old child who was abducted and murdered in Arlington, Texas in 1996.
“The Amber Alert did not go out at that time,” Dow said. “There’s a four-hour gap.”
At the time of the abduction, the baby’s mother, Venetta Benjamin, who has sole custody of the infant, was in a courtroom in Newark applying for a restraining order against Abdur-Raheem.
She emerged from her East Orange home briefly on Wednesday and pleaded for her daughter’s return.
“I just want my baby to get back home,” Benjamin said. “I ask anybody if they have seen my daughter to please contact police.”