Missing girl Maleah Davis: Stepfather tells of waking up after 24 hours
He says little girl was abducted after he was knocked unconsciousA Texas man whose 4-year-old stepdaughter is missing told police that he was knocked unconscious for nearly 24 hours and when he awoke at the side of a highway the girl was gone.
Darion Vence said he was driving to the Houston airport Friday night to pick up the girl’s mother, with the girl — Maleah Davis — and his 1-year-old son in the car.
On Highway 59 near the airport, he said, he heard a “popping noise,” like a popped tire, and pulled over to check on it. That’s when a blue pickup truck pulled up behind the car and two Hispanic males got out, according to Vence’s narrative to police.
One of the men commented, “Maleah looks very nice, looks very sweet,” according to Vence’s account.
The other man hit Vence in the head and he lost consciousness, he told police.
At one point, Vence said, he woke up and he was in the back of the truck with Maleah and her brother. Three Hispanic males were also in the vehicle.
He then passed out again, and when he awoke around 6 p.m. Saturday he was at the side of Highway 6 in the west Houston suburb of Sugar Land, about 40 miles from where he said he had encountered the men. His little boy was with him but Maleah was not, he said.
Vence said he walked to a hospital where he received treatment and reported her missing.
The stepfather’s story has “a lot of blanks,” Houston police Sgt. Mark Holbrook said, but he said he’s hoping the public can help them determine what happened.
Maleah and her two brothers were removed from their home last summer after reports of abuse, the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services told CNN.
The children were placed with a relative following physical abuse allegations, stemming from a head injury to Maleah, CPS said Monday night. A judge ordered their return home in February.
In a news conference Sunday, Holbrook said Maleah had had multiple brain surgeries, including one in recent months.
Maleah is about 3 feet tall and weighs 30 to 40 pounds. She was last seen wearing a light blue Under Armour jacket, blue jeans, gray Under Armour tennis shoes with pink and white details and a pink bow in her hair.
Maleah’s mother, Brittany Bowens, told CNN affiliate KTRK she feels “so lost.”
Through sobs, the mother pleaded for help saying losing the young girl is “too much to bear.”
“I can’t concentrate, I can’t focus,” she told the affiliate. “It’s so overwhelming for me. It doesn’t seem real.”
Bowens, who was returning from a trip to Massachusetts, got another family member to pick her up from the airport when Vence didn’t show up with the children, Holbrook said.
“(There’s) so many thoughts going on in my mind on what could have happened,” she told KTRK.
Police posted a representative photo of the blue pickup truck that Vence said the abductors were driving.
An Amber Alert describes the car as a blue, crew-cab Chevy pickup truck, possibly a 2010 year model.
The car Vence was driving — a silver Nissan Altima belonging to Bowens — is also missing, police said.
A traffic camera captured an image of the Altima just before 3 p.m. Saturday, driving through a Sugar Land intersection near the shopping mall where Vence said he woke up.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/05/07/missing-girl-maleah-davis-stepfather-tells-of-waking-up-after-24-hours/Here's a shakey abduction tale if ever I saw one.
