A 7-month-old girl was killed when an Ohio man who abducted his girlfriend’s infant and fled in a Camaro drove into a house at "full speed" after police tried to pull him over, authorities said.
Johnathan Baker, 23, allegedly took the girl after a dispute with his girlfriend Tuesday in the village of North Baltimore, the police chief in Tiffin, roughly 90 miles southwest of Cleveland, said in a statement Wednesday.
Hours after the fatal crash, the Seneca County Sheriff’s Office said the man who abducted the child “was feeling homicidal and suicidal,” adding, “He also claimed to have killed the baby.”
After the local police department sent out a “be on the lookout” alert, an off-duty officer in Tiffin, about 30 miles away, spotted the Camaro and provided its location for responding officers and deputies, the sheriff’s office said.
When an officer and deputy approached the car, it accelerated "at a high speed and erratically drove off the roadway striking a house at full speed," the sheriff's office said.
No one was home, Tiffin Police Chief David Pauly said.
Authorities broke the vehicle's back window and retrieved the baby, who was bleeding and whose breathing was shallow, the sheriff's office said.
The girl and Baker were taken by ambulance to a local hospital, where the infant was shortly pronounced dead, Pauly said. Baker was taken to Toledo and remains in critical condition, Pauly said.
It wasn't clear what charges Baker might face. Pauly said the investigation is in its early stages, and he didn't respond to a request for comment.