The mother of a two-year-old girl who was taken hostage in a Walmart has come forward to describe the terrifying ordeal.
On June 17, Alicia Keating was shopping with her daughters Ashley, 12, and Zoe, 2, at a Walmart in Midwest City, Oklahoma when a hulking man took the two-year-old child from the mother’s shopping cart and held a knife to the little girl’s stomach.
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“Here’s this huge man standing there with my daughter in his arms and has a knife pointing toward her side,” Keating told the Today show. “My first reaction was this can’t be real. Does he really have my baby? Who is this?”
The hostage taker was 37-year-old mental patient Sammie Wallace who started making garbled demands as he held a knife to the child’s stomach and throat for over 30 minutes.
“He said quietly, ‘Hey little momma, you see this knife?’” Keating recalled Wallace saying.
“I did not maintain my composure. I was completely freaked out. I wanted to reach out and grab her but he had a knife. There was nothing I could do but stand there and beg for her life,” Keating said.
While Keating pleaded with Wallace, a nearby customer blocked the hostage-taker’s path with his shopping cart while other witnesses called 911.
Eventually the police arrived, cleared everyone out of the store and started negotiating with Wallace.
“During negotiations we take all kinds of cues. We try to talk about his family, his job, about how the child is not afraid of him,” Midwest City Police Chief Brandon Clabes told Fox 25.
Unfortunately the negotiations did not work and Wallace started counting down from 60 saying that he would harm the child.
When Wallace got close to completing his countdown, negotiator David Huff, the Investigation Division Commander and 21-year veteran of the Midwest City Police Department, got up, took a couple of steps toward Wallace, and shot him.
“When you have a suspect that’s counting down on a child’s life, we’re going to have to take appropriate action and unfortunately we had to use deadly force,” said Sid Porter, Assistant Police Chief, Midwest City, Okla.
Little Zoe survived and was reunited with her mother.
“It was scary. It was like out of a movie,” Keating said.
“You can’t make this up. This is real life and it happened,” Midwest City Police Chief Brandon Clabes said of the ordeal.
“You’ve got the ingredients of a two-and-half-year-old helpless victim, you’ve got a mother who has to standby helplessly and watch as her daughter is being held by a mental patient with a knife and you have our officers responding.”
Captain Huff has been hailed a hero by District Attorney David Prater and according to Midwest City Police, the office agrees. The department said Captain Huff appreciates everyone’s interest but is declining to give interviews about the situation.
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