New details show officer almost botched 2nd chance to rescue kidnapped Fort Worth girl

A Forest Hill police sergeant discounted the report of two Good Samaritans who had called 911 and reported they’d found the car believed to have been used in the kidnapping of an 8-year-old girl in Fort Worth, according to the police chief.

“The two callers were obviously concerned,” Forest Hill Police Chief Dan Dennis said Thursday. “They had located what was correctly the suspect’s vehicle. He basically discounted that. He looked at the suspect vehicle as unrelated and essentially tried to talk them out of it being the right vehicle.”

Dennis said it was thanks to police 911 call takers that Fort Worth police officers were also dispatched to the WoodSpring Suites.

“Fort Worth showed up and took that same evidence and, within minutes, was breaching the door,” Dennis said.

Inside, Fort Worth officers found the 8-year-old girl and the kidnapping suspect, 51-year-old Michael Webb.

“God was at work here,” Dennis said.

Richardson Wolfe is also the same sergeant who had searched Webb’s room about two hours before the girl’s rescue but failed to find her, even though she was in the room.

On Thursday morning, Dennis provided more details about that failed search of the room to the Star-Telegram but said it wasn’t among the reasons that Wolfe was fired.

“I can’t say that the search was unreasonable,” Dennis said. “I can say that I wish the search had been done differently, but I can’t say it was unreasonable.”

Dennis said Wolfe was fired over his handling of the later report of the car being found.

Wolfe’s attorney, Robyn Trosper with the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas, said she delivered Wolfe’s appeal of his indefinite suspension on Thursday. She declined to comment further.

Failed hotel room search for girl

Wolfe had been dispatched to the hotel just after midnight May 19 after a desk clerk at the motel called 911. The clerk told dispatchers a person had called her, reporting they’d seen a man matching the kidnapper’s description with a young girl at the hotel.

The clerk told officers that based on the description provided by the caller, she believed it could be a man staying in a room on the third floor and directed the officers there.

Police said the officers knocked on the door of Room 333 for roughly seven minutes before receiving a response from Webb through the door.

Dennis said, at that time, the officers were acting on third-party information and didn’t have probable cause to force their way into the room.

They talked to Webb another approximately eight minutes, trying to gain consent to search the room before a reluctant Webb finally opened the door.

“So essentially, they talked their way into the room,” he said. “They spend something like 17 minutes trying to talk their way into that room. They wanted in that room. They really wanted to find that girl. They really pushed the bounds of consent to get into that room, quite frankly.”

He said even after Wolfe and the other officer finally convinced Webb to open the door and let them in the room, Webb’s cooperation seemed wavering.

“Even as they got in the room, he’s telling them, ‘I really don’t want you here,’” Dennis said. “That makes our consent pretty tenuous.”

“Sgt. Wolfe told him, ‘I just want to look where a four-foot-five child could be.’ He showed him a picture of the victim through the door. He said, ‘I’m looking for her. If you’ll just let me in, I don’t care about your drugs or guns or whatever else you’re doing in there, I just want to find the child.’”

As the other officer gave cover from the threshold of the door, Wolfe then looked throughout the hotel room and bathroom in search of the girl, including inside cabinets, the refrigerator, behind the shower curtain, and under the bed.

“Essentially every piece in the room where you would readily think you could hide a child was open, visible,” Dennis said. “He looked everywhere he thought she could be.”

Dennis said police now believe the girl was inside the room at the time of Wolfe’s search.

“She was in fact in the room,” he said.

He declined to say where he believed she had been hidden but sources have told the Star-Telegram that it was in a basket under clothing.

Dennis said Wolfe had been inside Webb’s room about 90 seconds before ending the search with the belief that the child was not there. He said while he wishes the search had been done differently, Wolfe did not violate any rules or policies in how he searched.

“I have to measure these folks against the performance of a reasonable officer,” Dennis said. “With the consent being as tenuous as it was, he’s basically trying to maintain that consent.”

Kidnapping suspect’s car

Dennis said two different officers did search the hotel parking lot after the first call, looking for a car that matched the description of the suspected kidnapper’s car. He said Wolfe had shared with the officers a photo of the suspect vehicle that he had found on the Fort Worth Police Department’s social media pages.

Dennis said the officers surmised from looking at the photograph that the car was either a Buick or Volvo but did not see a car matching that description in the hotel’s parking lot.

The investigation has since revealed, Dennis said, that Webb’s car - a gray Ford 500 - had been in the parking lot when officers were first called to the hotel.

He said hotel surveillance video also confirmed that Webb and the girl had not left the hotel room since their arrival hours earlier.

“It is not completely clear at this point if the photo is of the right vehicle,” Dennis said Thursday. “The forensic analysis will eventually tell us for sure.”

Fort Worth police Lt. Brandon O’Neil said Thursday that the department is confident the car in the picture is Webb’s.

At about 2 a.m. May 19, two Good Samaritans out searching for the kidnapped girl saw what appeared to be the suspect’s vehicle in the hotel’s parking lot. One of the men called 911.

“The call actually went to Fort Worth. Fort Worth transferred the call to us,” Dennis said.

But the Fort Worth call taker/dispatcher who first took the call, Crystal Merrill, ended up calling Forest Hill dispatchers back to ask if they would also like Fort Worth officers to respond.

“Even with all the calls flooding in, she recognized that call was different,” Dennis said.

Forest Hill dispatcher Marianna Mireles responded yes to the request, prompting Fort Worth officers to arrive 10 minutes after Wolfe and ultimately rescue the girl.

Dennis said other officers involved in the first call to the hotel were also investigated by the department but cleared of any wrongdoing.

Police sergeant’s reaction

Dennis said Wolfe had gone with the Fort Worth officers to Webb’s door and watched as they knocked down the door, rescued the girl, and arrested Webb.

“I can tell you his reaction through the entire incident did not meet my expectations,” Dennis said. “In my opinion, he seemed more concerned about being in trouble than anything else.”

Dennis said the failure to find the girl on that first search has weighed heavily on him and others with the department.

“We gave these folks time off for mental health reasons,” Dennis said. “I felt about two inches tall, and I wasn’t even there and had no role in this.”

Dennis said Wolfe, who had been with the department since 2012, had no prior discipline with the department. He said, however, a complaint had been filed against Wolfe two weeks earlier, alleging that he had tried to talk a person out of a making a criminal mischief report involving a broken window.

He said that complaint was waiting to be assigned for investigation when the kidnapping occurred.

Dennis said while he knows his department faced harsh criticism for its handling of the search of the motel room, as first reported by the Star-Telegram, he couldn’t previously release more information because of the investigation of Wolfe and the criminal case against Webb.

“If we have to get drug through the mud to assure that this criminal case goes forward and is successful, we’ll get drug through the mud,” Dennis said. “We will take it on the chin every day of the week because the reputation of my department is not as important as a successful prosecution in this case.”

Webb remains in federal custody.

Dennis said his department has also learned from the incident and will do things differently in the future.

“What we will do in the future at that point is, in every case, will contact the originating agency,” Dennis said. “The Fort Worth Police Department had a lot of information we didn’t have. If we had contacted them, that might have made a difference.”

This story was originally published June 20, 2019 at 1:07 PM.