Carlee Russell arrested, charged on false reporting allegations

(NewsNation) — Alabama woman Carlee Russell has been charged with two misdemeanors after police say she launched a false police search by staging her own abduction, officials announced Friday.

Russell, 25, of Hoover, turned herself in Friday and faces two misdemeanor charges of false reporting to law enforcement and falsely reporting an incident, local police said. Both are punishable by up to a year in jail.

Her total bond was set at $2,000. She posted bail Friday afternoon and was released from custody.

“Her decisions that night created panic,” Hoover Police Chief Nick Derzis said at a news conference Friday.

On July 13, Russell made a 911 call and told authorities she saw a lone toddler on the side of an Alabama highway. When police showed up at the location, they found Russell’s car but she and the toddler were nowhere to be found.

After a two-day search, Russell showed up at her mother’s home and claimed she had been abducted from the side of the highway by a man who came out of the trees when she stopped to check on the child. She claimed to have been blindfolded and detained at a home where a woman fed her cheese crackers, according to detectives. Russell went on to say she was put in a vehicle again but managed to escape and run through the woods to her neighborhood, police have said.

Days after she’d returned, police said they weren’t able to verify her claims.

Investigators say in the days before her disappearance, Russell searched for information on her cellphone about Amber Alerts, “Taken” — a movie about a woman’s abduction — and a one-way bus ticket from Birmingham, Alabama, to Nashville, Tennessee.

Her phone also showed she traveled about 600 yards while telling a 911 operator she was following the child, Derzis said.

On Monday, Derzis read a statement from Russell’s attorney, Emory Anthony.

According to Anthony, there was no kidnapping or a toddler walking along the highway. Nobody else was involved in the fabrication, according to the statement.

“My client apologizes for her actions to this community,” Anthony said in the statement.

Derzis on Friday said authorities have received multiple phone calls from people who feel the charges against Russell are too light.

“Let me assure you I, too, share the same frustration,” he said.

Derzis said he plans to contact state legislature and urge them to add an enhancement to the current law so people would face harsher penalties when they falsely report a kidnapping or other violent crimes.