Father confronts kidnapper

Associated Press

SALT LAKE CITY

A set of Utah parents were awakened Friday to an unsettling noise at 4:30 in the morning: the sound of their front door opening and their 5-year-old daughter talking.

When the father rushed outside in his pajama pants and hoodie, he saw the terrifying sight of his 5-year-old stepdaughter in the arms of a stranger who was carrying her away across the front lawn. The man had snatched the girl out of her bed in the basement moments earlier after coming in the house through an unlocked door, police said.

The father confronted the man, demanding that he give the girl back. Without a fight, the intruder handed her over and then fled the scene.

“There was a man in my home, and he took my 5-year-old daughter,” said the mother, crying, in a 911 call moments later. “I happened to wake up, and he had my daughter outside. My husband ran out there and got her from him. But he took my daughter.”

“But do you have your daughter back now?” said the dispatcher.

“Yeah, but he’s out there somewhere,” she said. “He came in my home. ... He took my daughter from my house.”

A man later identified as Troy Morley, 48, of Roy, Utah, was caught two blocks away after breaking into another house in a middle-class neighborhood in the Salt Lake City suburb of Sandy. Morley was arrested and booked on charges of child kidnapping, burglary, trespassing and resisting arrest.