Enid Mother Recalls Fear After Abduction

By Julie Bisbee, The Daily Oklahoman

Jul. 7–ENID — Sheila Wells hasn’t slept much the past few nights.

Each bump and creak of her older home makes her heart race. She asks her husband to check on strange noises. She walks around the house, checking on her children and pacing.

Early Thursday, Wells, 29, was awakened by a 12-year-old neighbor girl knocking at her door about 6 a.m. The girl said her younger sister slipped into the Wells home earlier that morning through an unlocked side door, past four other sleeping children and took Brandon, a bubbly blond 1-year-old.

When Wells arrived at the girl’s home, the boy was sitting on the 10-year-old girl’s lap, Wells said. His stroller, laden with clothing, diapers and children’s pain reliever, was in the back yard, she said.

“I asked her what she thought she was doing,” Wells said. “She told her mom she didn’t take him, that she found him on the side of the road. I honestly told her she was a liar, and that I was calling the cops.”

Wells was surprised she hadn’t heard the girls come in. After all, it had probably taken several minutes to gather all the toddler’s belongings and snap his stroller into place. Wells, who is expecting twins, was awake at 4 a.m. She thinks she must have been in deep sleep when the girls entered.

Fear turned to tears of joy Once she returned home with Brandon, panic turned to relief and made way for tears of joy.

“When she told me, I was just very mad. I wasn’t crying. I was just so upset. I kept thinking, why would they want to come into my house and take Brandon?” Wells said. “Once I got Brandon, I started crying. I think I was just crying because of happiness because he was safe.”

After returning home with her son, Wells noticed $20 was missing from her purse and there was a ransom note on the loveseat demanding $200,000 for Brandon’s safe return, signed by “The kidnappers.”

The 10-year-old and 12-year-old sisters remain in a juvenile detention facility. They appeared before a judge in juvenile court Thursday afternoon after being booked on accusations of first-degree burglary, kidnapping and extortion.

The district attorney has five business days to decide whether to press charges against the girls, said Joy Musser, Garfield County juvenile officer. If charged, the girls likely will remain in the juvenile system, since the cutoff age for a child to be charged as a youthful offender in a kidnapping case is 13, officials said.

Stacie Watkins, the mother of the two girls in custody, said the case is being blown out of proportion.

“My kids are struggling, they need to just let it be,” Watkins said. “They let all these sex offenders and drug people go, but they’re holding my kids?”

Watkins said her older daughter, who usually lives with her maternal grandmother, likely talked the younger girls into taking the boy.

“She’s a good kid,” Watkins said of the 10-year-old.

The families live in an older neighborhood just off the main drag in western Enid. The Wells family moved there because they thought the area would be safer than other parts of the northern Oklahoma community in the center of the state’s wheat belt. The homes, just a few miles from a gate entering Vance Air Force Base, resemble older military housing units. Most of the homes are rentals and tucked into small cul-de-sacs.

The Wells family lives about two blocks from the home where the 10-year-old and 12-year-old girls live.

The 10-year-old girl is a classmate of the oldest Wells child and was often at the home playing with the five children there.

Thursday morning was not the first time the 10-year-old girl had been at the Wells home unannounced, Wells said.

‘Too mature for their age’ Earlier this year, the girl and her sister convinced the oldest Wells child to leave his home around 2:30 a.m. and paid his younger sister not to tell anyone, Wells said.

“I don’t know,” Wells said. “It’s almost like they’re too mature for their age.”

Friday afternoon, new locks were installed on all the doors at the Wells home, including the side door the girls are believed to have used to enter the home early Thursday. Brandon is friendly and eager to offer strangers a smile, showing off a short row of teeth.

“Brandon doesn’t know who he should love and who he shouldn’t,” his dad Daniel Wells, 23, jokes. “He’s just easy, and there for the ride.”

Sheila and Daniel Wells think Brandon probably didn’t fear the 10-year-old girl. She had been at the house often and enjoyed playing with the toddler, Sheila said.

Although Brandon seems unscathed by the kidnapping, his parents say they’ve learned from the incident.

“Don’t take it for granted and think kids aren’t capable of doing something that an adult would do,” Daniel Wells said.

“And always make sure all your doors and windows are locked,” Sheila Wells said.

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