By The newspaper
Feb 22, 2024, 12:34 PM EST
Craig Nelson Ross Jr. pleaded guilty yesterday to kidnapping and sexually assaulting a 9-year-old girl who disappeared from a state park in upstate New York in September 2023.
Under the agreement, prosecutors will seek 25 years to life in prison for kidnapping and 22 years to life in prison for sexual assault. The admission of Ross Jr. (46) came just a few weeks before his trial began, he said. CBSNews.
Saratoga County District Attorney Karen Heggen calls the admission a victory for the family, whose daughter will now not have to testify in the courtroom.
“Her admission of guilt puts to rest the question of who was responsible for the kidnapping that brought our entire community together to help locate her. She will serve decades in prison before she can consider parole,” prosecutor Heggen said.
The girl’s kidnapping captured the nation’s attention last year. Charlotte Sena (9) disappeared on Saturday, September 30, 2023 while biking at a campground inside Moreau Lake State Park. Her parents started looking for her and only found her bicycle abandoned by her.
She was found two days later by the New York State Police (NYSP) inside a cabinet in a trailer behind the home of Ross Jr.’s mother, who kidnapped the girl and wrote a ransom letter with the intention of asking for money for her, authorities said.
“What happened was extraordinary,” NY Governor Kathy Hochul commented at the time, detailing that while the rest of Sena’s family remained in the camp where she had disappeared, the police guarding her home in Greenfield, about 40 miles north north of Albany, saw someone drop a note in his mailbox at 4:20 a.m. on Monday, October 2. NYSP fingerprinted the note and it matched Ross Jr., who was in a database for a 1999 drunk driving case.
Law enforcement officers linked Ross Jr. to a property owned by his mother, entered and found him on Monday around 6:30 p.m. “After some resistance, the suspect was detained and the girl was immediately found in a cabinet,” Hochul said. “She knew they were rescuing her. She knew she was in good hands.”
According to police, the suspect was not a registered sex offender, he noted. DailyNews. Neighbors told him Daily Mail that Ross Jr. suffers from multiple sclerosis and had recently moved to his mother’s property in Ballston Spa due to his condition.
After the arrest, his own son offered dramatic statements against him. “It’s disgusting, it’s disgusting… he should die. “I couldn’t care less,” said Joshua Ross, Ross Jr.’s son.
In a similar case, still without a happy ending, the girl of Mexican origin Dulce María Alavez has been missing for more than four years, last seen in a park in New Jersey when she was 5 years old, in September 2019. A reward offered of $75,000 dollars and the work of the FBI – one of the most advanced investigative forces in the world – have not been enough to find her or at least know what happened to her.