A man and woman, who St. Paul police arrested on suspicion of attempted kidnapping at a park on Wednesday, pointed the finger at each other when they were released from the Ramsey County jail Friday.
“She’s the one that did everything, and I’m just an innocent bystander,” said Thomas Lee Johnson, 60.
But Carmen Moreno (also known as Carmen Moreno Santiago), 56, told reporters, “He’s the one that got me in trouble,” of Johnson.
Police arrested the pair Wednesday night after a mother reported that she found a female stranger holding her 4-year-old daughter’s hand in a restroom at Indian Mounds Regional Park and that the woman asked how much it would cost to buy her children. The mother said she left the restroom with her 1- and 4-year-old daughters, saw a man nearby and feared he was acting as a lookout.
Individuals can be jailed for 36 hours before they are charged or released. Police continue to investigate the Mounds Park case, and no charges have been filed, so Johnson and Moreno were released from jail Friday.
Outside the jail, Moreno quickly got into a waiting car. The St. Paul woman spoke only one sentence, about Johnson being the one who got her in trouble, before leaving. Johnson, of Inver Grove Heights, spoke with reporters for more than 20 minutes.
Johnson said he retired after working as a kitchen manager at a bar for many years but still goes back to help (he did not want to name the establishment). He said he knew Moreno from the bar but had not hung out with her before Wednesday.
Johnson was giving Moreno a ride home when they stopped to get some beer. They went to Mounds Park, where Johnson said Moreno had a beer and they talked. He said the relationship was a friendship and that he told Moreno he is married.
Johnson said he saw Moreno talking to a girl by the pavilion but told her to stop because he was worried that parents would call the police about her drinking in the park. Otherwise, Johnson said he and Moreno had no discussions about children.
At one point, Johnson said he went to use the men’s restroom and Moreno went to the women’s restroom, then he waited at a table nearby for Moreno to come out.
At about 8:30 p.m., police received a report about an incident in the women’s restroom. The mother reported she was helping her 1-year-old daughter in a bathroom stall and her 4-year-old daughter was just on the other side when she heard someone talking to the girl.
“Who are you talking to?” she asked her daughter. “Shhhhh,” someone whispered, according to police. The mother opened the stall door and saw the unknown woman holding her daughter’s hand.
Johnson said he’s confident that surveillance video will show he was sitting at the table and not near the bathroom door. He said that when police surrounded them, he initially thought it was because Moreno had been drinking in the park and was shocked when he found out later about the allegation.
“Whatever she said to them kids, it was in the lady’s bathroom, so I have no idea what was said,” Johnson said.
Johnson described himself as a father and grandfather, married for 37 years, and a veteran who served at the end of the Vietnam War.
“I would never, ever, ever touch a kid,” he said. “ … I want to be proven innocent of any and all allegations.”
Neither Johnson nor Moreno has been charged in Minnesota with violent crimes, court records show. But the Ramsey County attorney’s office had considered charges against Johnson in 1990 for third-degree criminal sexual conduct and fifth-degree criminal sexual conduct in 1991; prosecutors declined to file charges in both cases due to lack of evidence to prove them beyond a reasonable doubt, according to a county attorney’s spokesman.
Johnson said Friday that both were instances of relatives who were angry at him and making false allegations because they wanted to get back at him. A police report in one case indicated that a female relative, who was a young adult, reported Johnson had grabbed her buttocks over her clothes. Information about the other case was not available Thursday or Friday.
Of the new allegations, Johnson said Friday: “It’s devastating for me, my family, my work, all my friends … everybody that knows me now sees me on TV, and it’s just like going back to the ‘90s where I’m going to be under this cloud now for a long, long time until it goes away. I know I’m innocent; I know that for a fact. I told them I’d take a lie detector test, whatever they want, to prove that I’m telling the truth and that I did not have any idea or any knowledge of her intention of trying to get any kids.”