ANDERSON, Calif. — Police arrested a Rogers woman Saturday in connection with kidnapping her eight children from foster care in Arkansas.
Anderson is a town of about 11,000 in north-central California, about 2,000 miles by road from Rogers. Police responded to a concerned resident call requesting a check on a group of six children in a parking lot and the woman they were with.
The caller told regional dispatchers the woman was acting bizarre, according to the post on the Anderson Police Department’s Facebook page.
The call came in around 12:30 a.m. Saturday, according to the department’s post. Police arrived at the parking lot of the AM/PM convenience store in Anderson where they found a white crew cab Dodge pickup with Arkansas plates. They identified the woman with the children as Trista Fullerton, 36, of Rogers.
A check of police records revealed Fullerton was wanted in Arkansas for abduction of her eight children. She lost custody of those children in Arkansas for reasons not specified in the post.
Police arrested Fullerton, who then told police where the other two children were, according to the post. Shasta County, Calif., deputies went to the home Fullerton described, near Cottonwood, a town about 5 miles south of Anderson. All eight children were brought to Anderson in coordination with Shasta County Children and Family Services. The children are in the process of being returned to their foster placements, according to the police post. Details of which or how many foster homes the children were going to were not included in the post.
None of the children were harmed, Lt. Mike Hallagan of the Anderson Police Department said in a telephone interview Monday. The oldest child was 16 and three were younger than five years old, Hallagan said. No additional charges were filed in California, he said. The arrest warrant for Fullerton originated from Benton County, he said.