The infant girl found last month naked in the canal on I-135 in Wichita had “sunburn … to most of body,” according to a court document released this week in the case against the girl’s father.
The 11-month-old was also covered in mud, with a “large visible scrape” on her forehead and bruising and abrasions throughout her body.
A driver on southbound I-135, near Mount Vernon bridge, was looking for ducks when they saw a “baby running with their hands in the air” in the canal and called 911.
It was 1:55 p.m. on July 23.
First responders found the girl in a dry area of the canal at 2:08 p.m.
It had been roughly 12 hours since the girl was last seen with her father, Vincent James Perez, who police were looking for after Perez threatened someone with an axe or hatchet and then an officer found an abandoned stroller, according to the arrest affidavit.
He has been charged with two counts of aggravated endangering of a child and one of aggravated battery against a woman late the night before the child was found.
The court document provides new details.
Here is a timeline of what police say happened in the hours before the child was found in the canal:
10:43 p.m., July 22: A woman called police saying that a man tried to kill her with a wrench.
The woman was at a friend’s house when one of his friends came over with a baby girl. She and her friend were in a room when the baby crawled in. The father came in and put his hand over the baby’s mouth, like he was trying to suffocate the baby.
The woman yelled “hey” to him to get him to stop.
A little while later, he choked the woman with the wrench. She yelled for her friend but passed out before he came. She woke up to her friend yelling at the man to leave.
The man and baby left. He had a axe, or hatchet, and a wrench with him, which worried the woman.
The man left behind in the driveway a diaper bag that had bottles, toys, baby food and hospital discharge papers for the mother.
The next day, a detective looked up the mother and saw that she had cases involving 34-year-old Perez.
The detective called the mother and asked if she had a child. She responded, “What the (expletive), yes I do.” She said that Perez got the child on July 22 and that they last texted at 7 p.m. that night, when he told her she was doing fine and that their child was on his lap.
The woman strangled with the wrench later picked out the wrong person in a lineup of photos as the person who choked her.
1:42 a.m., July 23: Two men, one a gas station employee, flagged down an officer at the intersection of Harry and Hydraulic.
They told the officer that the man abandoned the baby and then walked into Linwood Park.
The employee said the man pushed the baby in a stroller around the gas station from 12:30 a.m. to around 1:30 a.m. but didn’t buy anything. The gas station is at 1601 South Hydraulic.
The other man told the officer he was in the park and found the stroller with a baby in it. He yelled for a parent but no one responded. He started pushing the baby along and kept yelling for a parent.
Someone also went to the gas station to call 911.
Then, a man walked out from under the bridge asking why the man was yelling for a parent. The man took the baby and the stroller.
The two men who flagged down the officer started following the man and baby. The man pulled out an axe or hatchet “to protect himself and the baby,” but he didn’t threaten them.
The men went back to the gas station and waited for police to arrive.
An officer searched the area and found a black stroller tipped over on a hill north of the Harry Street underpass before I-135. The officer kept walking east on Harry and found a baby carrier and lunchbox in the grass. Inside the lunchbox was a Craftsman wrench.
The friend whose house Perez was at earlier in the night recognized him from a surveillance photo at the gas station that police showed him.
When she was found, the child was taken into police protective custody.
Perez was arrested on July 24 and remains in Sedgwick County Jail.
One of his arresting charges includes parole violation. Perez was released from prison in February, according to Kansas Department of Corrections records.
He has seven convictions in Sedgwick County in 2015 and 2016 for aggravated assault, aggravated burglary, assault, criminal possession of a weapon by a felon, a drug charge and two counts of theft, KDOC records show.
Source Agencies
