A Florida couple has been charged with child neglect after they allegedly left a boy on the side of Interstate 75 earlier this month with a bag of handguns.
North Port police said they were alerted to the juvenile walking along the side of the busy highway just before 6 p.m. on October 1, WWSB reported. When they arrived, he told them that when he got home from school that day, Bradley Leon Guerrero Santos, 36, and Rosanella Mendiola Borja, 35, told him they were going on trip, an affidavit said.
After he walked the family dog, he returned home to see the couple “frantically” throwing clothes into bags and into the car.
The boy said he was told the trip was either to Guam or Idaho as the couple loaded him and a sibling into the car. They left, but when they got onto the highway, the boy said he told them he didn’t want to go on the trip, so the couple pulled over, gave him two bags containing a .40 caliber handgun, a 9mm handgun, and some cash and told him to take care of the house. They drove away.
The boy, who had a cell phone with a dead battery so he couldn’t call for help, also told investigators that Guerrero Santos is extremely religious and often gives him difficult tasks — which he had assumed this incident was — to test his mental fortitude, WTVT reported. The boy said Guerrero Santos calls him the “chosen one.”
Police tried multiple times to call the couple’s cell phones, but the person answering denied being Santos or hung up, WWSB said. They took the boy home, where they found the garage door and front door wide up. Inside they found the home “to be cluttered in disarray, with firearms laying out in the open,” the affidavit said.
Police then tracked the couple’s cell phones to a parking lot in Wauchula, about 60 miles from North Port, where they were found with the other juvenile and taken into custody, WTVT reported.
Santos and Borja were charged with neglect of a child without great bodily harm, and Santos was also charged with allowing a juvenile to have possession of a firearm.
It’s not clear what happened to the other child, and media reports did not include the children’s ages or describe the relationship between the children and the arrested couple.
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[Featured image: Bradley Leon Guerrero Santos and Rosanella Mendiola Borja/Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office]
