Reader discretion: this story contains details of violence some readers may find distressing.
Late on the night of Saturday, May 4, 2019, a man carrying a little boy walked into Houston Methodist Sugar Land Hospital, southwest of Houston, Texas.
His name was Derion Vence. He was 26. The boy in his arms was his 1-year-old son. Vence had a wound on his head, and he had a story for the staff, and then for the police.
He said a little girl had been taken.
Three men in a blue pickup
The girl was Maleah Davis. She was 4 years old, with big curls and a gap-toothed grin. Her mother, Brittany Bowens, had been engaged to Vence. The engagement ended the day Bowens flew to Massachusetts to be with her dying father, but she left Maleah and the other children in Vence’s care anyway. She said she trusted him.
Vence told police that on the night of Friday, May 3, he had set off for Bush Intercontinental Airport with Maleah and his son to pick Bowens up.
On the Eastex Freeway near Greens Road, he said, he heard a popping noise and pulled over to check for a flat tire. A blue Chevrolet crew-cab pickup stopped behind him. Three Hispanic men in their 30s got out. One of them hit him on the head and he went down.
He said he was unconscious for about 24 hours. When he came to, on Saturday evening, he was on the side of Highway 6 in Sugar Land with his son. Maleah was gone. So was his silver Nissan Altima. He said he walked to the hospital.
On Sunday, May 5, Texas issued an Amber Alert for Maleah. Texas EquuSearch volunteers started combing the brush along the freeway where Vence said he had been attacked.
The story starts to move
Sugar Land police, who first heard his account, said important parts of it changed while they were still interviewing him. The Houston Police Department took over the case.
The first crack was the car. Vence had reported his Nissan stolen by the kidnappers. But surveillance video showed somebody driving that same silver Altima, the car he said was gone, to drop him off at the hospital.
So detectives went back to where the story started: the family’s apartment complex in southwest Houston, and the security cameras around it.
The last image of Maleah
They found Maleah on a neighbor’s camera on the morning of Tuesday, April 30, the day her mother left for Massachusetts.
Just before 8 a.m., a little girl in a pink skirt runs across the grass of the complex. A few steps ahead of her walks Derion Vence. They are heading into the apartment.
It is the last image of Maleah alive. Police sources told reporters the cameras never showed her leaving again. Later that day, the cameras caught Vence walking through the complex alone.
That was three days before the “kidnapping.”
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