Three weeks before a man attacked a woman near Ketner Lake, someone with a similar description choked an 8-year-old boy in a possible kidnapping attempt.
The man ran away only after the boy’s sister and her friend yelled, cursed and threw their cellphones at him and the friend pulled on Chandler Jameson’s arm.
“I don’t know if he was trying to kill him, scare him or kidnap him,” said Lisa Jameson, Chandler’s mother.
Westminster police are soliciting information from the public about the attack on the woman on Memorial Day weekend in the belief that the same man may have kidnapped and slain 10-year-old Jessica Ridgeway.
The attack on the 8-year-old boy was not reported in the media until Friday, when Fox 31 News ran a story.
Jameson said that on May 10, she drove to a Target store about a half-mile from her home near Westcliff Parkway and Church Ranch Boulevard, leaving her 13-year-old daughter Tori and her friend Jeannie, 13, in charge of Chandler at her home. It was a warm day at about 6:30 p.m.
The Jamesons’ backyard abuts a trail and a narrow green space next to a creek that leads to Ketner Lake about a mile away. The kids went outside playing with toy guns. Chandler had a plastic black gun with an orange top that makes “Star Wars” sounds. One of the girls had a gun that shoots Nerf darts, and the other had a toy wooden gun.
As they were walking along the trail near a street, the girls noticed an “attractive” white man who was between 5 feet 6 inches and 6 feet tall, wearing jogging shorts, a Bolder Boulder T-shirt and green-and-white running shoes. He had a shaved head and no facial hair. He was trim and athletically built.
He kept looping down through a tunnel that went under the street and jogged by the kids about four or five times.
When the girls lost interest in their mock shooting game and Tori called her mother on her cellphone, the man suddenly grabbed Chandler, Jameson said.
The girls were talking on their phones and had their backs to Chandler, who was leaning against a railing that separated the trail from the street. The jogger grabbed Chandler by the neck, snatched his toy gun and threw it into the lake and was trying to lift him over the railing to the street.
Listening on the phone, Jameson heard Chandler scream. “The phone just died,” she said.
The girls threw their guns and cellphones at the jogger. Jeannie grabbed Chandler’s hand and tugged. The man finally let go and ran down a trail between Mandalay Middle School and Semper Elementary School.
Within minutes, Jameson reached the kids and they got into her car. When the children told her what had happened, she called police and started searching for the man in her car.
Firefighters and about 15 police cars responded to the attempted kidnapping, she said. A detective was assigned to the case. Investigators weren’t able to get fingerprints from the suspect on Chandler’s broken gun.
The incident proved more traumatic to Tori than to her little brother, who had bruises on his neck, Jameson said.
“My daughter was just bawling,” she said.
The family soon moved away because of the incident.
The kidnapping and slaying of Jessica Ridgeway made her very sad, Jameson said.
Chandler mentions the attack every once in a while, she said. He recently told a friend, “You haven’t been attacked by a man. I have.”
Kirk Mitchell: 303-954-1206, or
