Kidnapped Girl Who Chewed Off Restraints To Escape Led Authorities To Find Two Dead Bodies
A 12-year-old Alabama girl escaped her kidnapper on August 1, 2022, leading police to discover the deceased bodies of a 29-year-old woman and a 14-year-old boy.
Tallapoosa County Sheriff's Office
On August 1, 2022, a kidnapped 12-year-old girl from Alabama managed to chew her way through her restraints and escape, leading officers to make a deadly discovery.
Court documents said the girl had been abducted on July 24 and tied to bed posts for about a week while she was assaulted and given alcohol to keep her in a drugged state.
The girl managed to get free and escape by chewing through her restraints, breaking her braces in the process, the documents said. Deputies who found her noticed she had marks on her wrists where she had been restrained.
On August 1, a driver found the girl walking alone along County Road 34 in Dadeville, Alabama and stopped to help her before calling the police.
When law enforcement officials visited the suspect's home in rural Alabama, they found the dead bodies of a woman and a juvenile there. Tallapoosa County Sheriff Jimmy Abbett called the child a “hero” for the information that led to this gruesome discovery.
The victims were identified as 29-year-old Sandra Vazquez Ceja and her 14-year-old son Omar Gallegos Vazquez. The bodies of Ceja and Vazquez were reportedly "cut into small pieces at the joints to hide evidence," according to the Associated Press. Ceja was smothered with a pillow and the boy was hit and kicked to death, documents showed.
The alleged kidnapper, José Paulino Pascual-Reyes, 37, was arrested and charged with first-degree kidnapping, abuse of corpse, and capital murder, according to The New York Times.
In March 2023, he was indicted on nine counts of capital murder and two counts of corpse abuse, according to WSB-TV.
