Illegal immigrant accused in attempted teen kidnapping deported 5 times

According to authorities, an illegal immigrant from Mexico who has been deported from the United States five times has been detained for allegedly trying to abduct a young girl from Alabama in a store parking lot at approximately 5:40 p.m. on New Year’s Eve. In connection with the incident, 31-year-old Yordy Centeno Melchor is being jailed on a $100,000 bond and charged with second-degree attempted kidnapping. Elmore County Sheriff Bill Franklin told Fox News Digital, “It appears that he sort of enticed the girl, who was attempting to move a buggy, when he entered the parking lot.” “And she was there, or close to his car. However, he persuaded her to approach the car. She is a young girl. She is seventeen years old.

Melchor allegedly fled the scene after being confronted by another man who spotted the girl “in distress” and the sheriff’s office issued a be-on-the-lookout (BOLO) alert for the area. In his “notes” area, the suspect described “what he was going to do,” according to Franklin, who later secured a search warrant for his phone from the sheriff’s office. “He was going to give her $200, and I won’t get into the intricacies of that, but he was obviously trying to coax her to get in the car,” said the sheriff. Although the exact date Melchor penned the message is unknown, the victim claimed investigators he showed it to her, maybe to let the girl know he was about to offer her money.

The purported kidnapping attempt took place in a parking lot near Holtville. Authorities were able to identify the suspect’s license plate number after an employee at the Holtville store where the incident occurred gave them camera footage from the parking lot. Authorities stopped a car that matched the one at the crime site a few days later in a county thirty miles north of Elmore, and they were able to match the suspect vehicle’s license plates. Melchor, the driver, fit the suspect’s description as well. “ICE and we will work together. We will continue to work with ICE. After Melchor was arrested, a local woman saw his mugshot and claimed to have seen a man who looked like him in the girl’s restroom in Walmart. Melchor has connections to Shelby County, Alabama, and San Antonio, Texas. According to the sheriff, he was known to go between the two regions to see relatives.

If investigators are able to identify any other victims, the offender may be charged with further crimes. The police, according to Franklin, are a “great group of guys” who “all have the same plight to keep Elmore County safe.” Although Elmore County is neither really big nor little, he continued, local authorities “just don’t deal with a lot of” cases of this kind.