A woman has been arrested after trying to buy a toddler for $500,000 (£371,000) from his mother in a supermarket queue, police say.
Rebecca Lanette Taylor, 49, from Crockett, Texas, allegedly approached the mother, her one-year-old son and baby while waiting in a Walmart self-checkout line on 13 January and said she liked the boy’s “blonde hair and blue eyes” and asked how much she could buy him for.
The affidavit, obtained by local news site The Messenger, said: “(The mom) tried to laugh this comment off, thinking Taylor was joking. Taylor told her that she had $250,000 in the car and she would pay that much for him. (The mom) told her no amount of money would do.”
Ms Taylor continued to press the matter and the mother of the child “told her to back away from her son”. She did not listen to the mother and said “she had been wanting to purchase a baby for a long time”.
Police say a second unidentified woman, who was with Ms Taylor during the incident, began to ask what the boy’s name was.
When the mother refused to tell them, the two women began to call the child by his name “with what the mom believed to be no prior knowledge of it”.
After waiting for the two women to leave the supermarket, the mother began to walk towards her car with her two children.
“Once in the parking lot,” the police report went on to state, “Taylor began screaming at (the mom), saying if she wouldn’t take $250,000 for him, then she would give her $500,000 because she wanted him and she was going to take him.”
As the mother locked herself and her children in her car, Ms Taylor stood behind a black SUV parked next to hers. She then repeatedly told her she wanted to purchase the child for $500,000. Eventually, Ms Taylor left in the SUV.
Ms Taylor was taken into custody on 18 January and charged with the offence of the sale or purchase of a child, a third-degree felony.
Lt. Ahleea Price with the Crockett Police Department said that when she went to Ms Taylor’s residence to ask her the incident, she was told that “she doesn’t like thieves, then she stated I could speak with her attorney and to get off her ‘precipice.’ She slammed the door shut.”
