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Man says he was abducted on Warren’s Southwest side, assaulted and held for two days
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
A Southington man, 29, reported Wednesday that he was kidnapped at gunpoint Sunday afternoon, robbed, assaulted and held in a garage with a “cover” over his head for more than two days before escaping early Wednesday.
The man said he had gone to a house on Lener Avenue Southwest at 11 a.m. and repaired someone’s furnace, then left on foot to get a ride home about 3 p.m.
As he walked north toward West Market Street, possibly near Hamilton Street, a car stopped behind him, and he was abducted, with someone placing a dark cover over his head, holding a gun to his back and ordering him into a car, he said.
Multiple people had him get out of the car about four minutes later and had him walk into a home and sit in a chair. He was bound to the chair, with a belt around his legs, and the cover was still over his head, he said.
Someone took the $150 he made fixing the furnace and his cellphone, he said.
They beat him for several hours on and off and placed a hot item on his torso, which caused second- and third-degree burns, a police report said. He was treated at ValleyCare Trumbull Memorial Hospital for burns and bruising.
“I could clearly see that he had been beaten,” Patrolman Richard Kovach reported. “His entire face around his eyes was purple, nose was broke, and his eyes had broken blood vessels in them.”
The officer added, “I did see the marks on his chest and back that appears to be that of a hot knife [held] on his skin,” the report says.
The victim freed himself about 2 a.m. Wednesday and ran, finding that he was near the garbage transfer station on Martin Luther King Boulevard on the city’s West Side, he said.
He tried to flag down a trash truck, but it would not stop, the victim said. He walked to his girlfriend’s house on the West Side, and she drove him to the hospital.
The man did not give the hospital his real name, the police report said. The man told police he has a drug problem, and he owed a drug dealer $70 “from in the past.”
The victim was charged with a felony drug possession in August 2015, according to Warren Municipal Court records.