Three people have been accused of staging a fake kidnapping in Plainfield.
Police said they tied a girl up with duct tape, and threw her in a car right in front of a convenience store.
We spoke with some of the suspects after they bonded out of jail, they told us they had been joking around with duct tape, and this was a misunderstanding.
“The word kidnapping never came up,” Danny Vinal explained. Staging a kidnapping was exactly what he and his two friends were accused of doing. “Never the intention of anything like this whatsoever,” Harley Jane Davidson added.
Danny Vinal, Mark Reasoner, and Harley Jane Davidson were arrested just after 7 o’clock Tuesday morning.
Plainfield Police said they went through with an elaborate hoax at this Cumberland Farms on South Main Street in Moosup. A hoax the suspects denied. “We wanted to have fun that was it. It was all about fun,” Davidson admitted.
Several people called 911, and said they saw Vinal and Reasoner in the parking lot.
The witnesses claimed they allegedly tied up Davidson with duct tape, then threw her in the trunk of a car and took off. Police found all three of them at a home less than a mile away.
“They said they had nothing going on there was nothing to do they thought this would be a funny prank to pull,” said Police Chief Michael Surprenant. For him, the prank was not funny.
Many of his exhausted officers rushed here from an overnight standoff with a man barricaded in his home. “It spread us very thin.
We were already working another major crime at the time when this came in we thought we had a female victim inside the trunk,” Chief Surprenant added.
There was no victim in the trunk, and taxpayers who fronted the bill for possible police overtime weren’t amused either. “Definitely disappointing that police had to come out waste their time,” said Nate Collello.
According to the group of friends, they had been joking around, and duct taped each other out of boredom.
They claimed a prank was never the plan. “Definitely not, I was hoping it wasn't going to turn out like that,” Danny Vinal added.
All three suspects were charged with breach of peace. They will face a judge in a few weeks.