Ark. Mom Allegedly Orchestrated Daughter's Fake Kidnapping to Teach Her a Bizarre Lesson By Sean Neumann

An Arkansas husband is defending his wife’s decision to stage the fake kidnapping of their mentally disabled daughter in an alleged effort to try and teach her a lesson about talking to strangers online.

The alleged Nov. 17 incident, which reportedly turned violent and left the couple’s daughter injured, has now led to charges against the girl’s mother, Tamara Hamby, according to reports from the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, the Southwest Times Record and local KFSM.

“We tried everything,” Tamara’s husband and the girl’s adoptive father, Jeffrey Hamby, told KFSM.

He said the girl had been communicating in an online chat room with a man who claimed to be country singer Luke Bryan. They believed the person on the other end of the chatroom had intentions to kidnap their daughter and that their efforts to get her to stop communicating with the online imposter hadn’t worked — so, Jeffrey told the outlet, his wife allegedly plotted to imitate a kidnapping to scare their daughter straight.

“He was going to get her. He was going to take her,” the father told KFSM of the online chatter. “And so, my wife, without my knowledge, with her aide and a couple of their friends, tried to do an intervention.”

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Citing local police, the outlets reported that Tamara allegedly arranged for two men to grab their daughter and take her to a field where she was later tied to a tree and left there. The incident reportedly left the 22-year-old — who Jeffrey claims has the mental acuity of an 11-year-old — with bruises on her wrist from zip ties used to restrain her.

“If your own special-needs daughter, who has the mentality of an 11 year-old, has an auditory processing disorder, and is a tactile learner, becomes influenced by an online predator she believes is the well-known public figure Luke Bryan, and that predator tells her he’s coming to pick her up, and she wants to go with him, how do you teach her, someone with no concept or understanding of evil, that danger exists?” Jeffrey reportedly wrote on social media while trying to explain the incident, according to the Arkansas Democrat Gazette. 

He continued: “After exhausting every possible avenue trying to prevent contact including pleading with three different law-enforcement agencies for help and receiving none, a caring parent would try to show her, in the safest and most controlled way possible, what real danger looks like in order to protect her from this predator.”

According to the Gazette, Tamara was arrested and charged with suspicion of kidnapping and first-degree endangering the welfare of an incompetent person. Her accomplices — David Q. Quach, 26; Austria L. Nico, 22; and Shannon Jazmin Yvonne Childers, 27 — all face the same charges. County jail records reviewed by PEOPLE show all four are no longer in custody.

Tamara is due in court on Dec. 10, the outlet reported.

“My wife is arrested for trying to do the right thing,” Jeffrey told KFSM, though he admitted her alleged kidnapping plot was “ill-conceived” and “really poorly executed.”

“We couldn’t talk her into understanding that danger existed, and so we wanted to show her that evil does exist,” the father told the outlet. “And now she’s in DHS custody, and my wife is facing jail time.”