In a bizarre case, Idaho Falls police police charged Michael Garrison Raine, a 24-year-old inactive student at Brigham Young University, with felony second-degree kidnapping after police say he walked around a Costco on November 20, 2025, with someone else’s 4-week-old baby in a shopping cart.
According to court documents and the woman’s report to police, the mother — identified as Natalie Millett — took her infant child and adult sister to Costco that morning. Millett placed her baby in a car seat placed in the main basket of the shopping cart. Per the police report, the seat “protruded above the top portion of the cart,” making the infant plainly visible, according to East Idaho News.
Millett described what happened on social media
Then, after roughly 15 minutes of shopping, Millett walked toward the bookstore aisle, leaving the cart just a few feet behind her. She later described seeing Raine “lingering” nearby. As she flipped through a book, she got a “weird feeling” and turned around only to find her cart and her baby gone.
Millett later shared her experience on social media, writing, “I frantically started scanning my surroundings and didn’t see my cart anywhere in sight. My mind felt frozen in all my panic while my body charged into action.”
Millett said she ran down the aisle where she and Raine had been standing, the man she said she saw earlier walking around the book section. She saw Raine pushing my cart with her baby inside. “He dropped his hands quickly off my cart,” Millett wrote. According to her, Raine immediately began apologizing, saying, “I’ll never do that again, I promise.”
The book sniffing incident
Security camera footage reviewed by investigators reportedly captured Raine entering the Costco location around 10:20 a.m. with an empty shopping cart. At about 10:40 a.m., it showed him walking through the book section without a cart, examining books and — per the affidavit — “opening a book, bringing the opened book up to his nose, then sniffing the center pages very closely.”
Moments later, as the mother and her baby entered the same aisle, Raine allegedly “grabbed the front end of the cart and spun it around behind her,” then walked off pushing it. The woman then tracked down the cart a few aisles over in the snack section.
After retrieving the cart, the mother left with her child. Meanwhile, surveillance footage shows Raine proceeding to a self-checkout, using a membership belonging to another BYU-Idaho student, purchasing some items, then eating at Costco’s food court before leaving the store.
Raine’s changing story: “Nothing of note” — then “Oh! That!”
When detectives first interviewed Raine on November 26 at a Marine Corps recruiting station in Idaho Falls — where he had reportedly gone seeking to enlist — he denied that anything unusual occurred. He told investigators he had merely visited Costco that day and insisted “nothing out of the ordinary happened.”
But when officers told him a child had been stolen that day, Raine appeared to recall the event, saying, “Oh! That! I am so sorry. I remember that now.”
He told police he had taken the wrong cart by mistake. When asked how he could have missed seeing an infant strapped into the car seat, Raine told investigators, “I was just so oblivious.” Raine apologized multiple times and reportedly asked the woman, “Is she OK? Is there anything I should do?”
Prosecutors in Bonneville County charged Raine with one count of second-degree kidnapping. He was booked into the county jail on a $15,000 bond, which was later reduced to $5,000; Raine posted bond and was released on November 28. He is scheduled for a preliminary hearing on December 10, 2025. Meanwhile, the mother, Millett, told investigators she and her family are working with the police and the prosecutor to “determine if there is enough evidence to proceed to court.”
