Coeur d’Alene Parasail employees intervened to assist a 10-year-old boy in fleeing a case of attempted child enticement.
In an evening in August 2021, a man was captured on security footage approaching the Couer d’Alene Parasail booth with a young child.
The kid approached multiple staff at CDA Parasail right away and informed them that the man had attempted to entice him into one of the nearby boats.
“Immediately the kid went around me and kind of hid behind me, and stated, ‘I don’t know that man and he’s not my dad,'” Jamin Rodriguez, owner of CDA Parasail told KREM 2 “I look at the guy he’s with and he’s like, ‘No, that’s my kid, I’m his dad, he woke up from a nap a little bit ago and he’s just kind of groggy from that and he is just kind of confused.”
The Kootenai County Sheriff’s Office said that the suspect, later identified as John Marshall Randolph, reportedly claimed he was the boy’s father. Rodriguez could sense a problem. The man promised Rodriguez he would “get the boy’s mom” after moving the child out of the way. Rodriguez made a covert call to the police but carried on.
“He started heading back down the dock, and I’m like, ‘Riley, you stay with the kid, find his mom, I’m gonna go follow this guy.'” Rodriguez added. “We can’t let him go. If we let him go, he could be gone forever.”
Since Rodriguez is a parent, he recognized the threat posed to the kid who was hiding behind him. He tracked Randolph’s every move for fifteen minutes around the lake.
“He’s like, ‘Stop following me, leave and go back to your booth,’ and I was like, ‘No.'” he said. “He was like a main actor in like a horror movie, like that kinda creepy oddness.”
Riley Estes, one of his employees, stayed with the child while he went in search of the boy’s mother. They searched around Lake CDA Park after trying her cell phone.
“He says, ‘she’s right there, can we run?’ and so we both started to run to her,” Estes said. “He was crying, super sad. Mom was shocked, obviously.”
The mother of the boy said to KREM 2 that everything is surreal but that she is incredibly appreciative of the men’s assistance.
Officers then came on the area and took Randolph into custody.
Randolph was charged with one count of child enticement and lodged in the Kootenai County Jail and was released on bond.
“I just hope that the law does a good job at the situation and, importantly, that just in general, people are just more aware of the fact that this stuff could happen in our little town of Coeur d’Alene,” Rodriguez said.