Early on a Thursday morning in April, Angela Crute, her 22-year-old special needs daugher Takai, and an unknown woman boarded a Kalamazoo Metro Transit bus and rode it to the Kalamazoo Valley Community College in Texas Township, Michigan. There, they walked behind the school and into the Al Sabo land preserve.
Michigan State Police say a maintenance worker spotted the group and asked what they were doing. Angela Cruze told him she and Takai’s aunt were taking her for a walk, WPBN reported.
Suspicious, the worker called police, who searched for the group but couldn’t find them.
Twelve hours later, a hiker found Takai, who is non-verbal, alone on the preserve, carrying a garbage bag of clothes. Her mother and the other woman — who was not her sister — were nowhere to be found.
Takai is now in the care of Adult Protective Services in Michigan while authorities search for her mother. Police say they plan to seek vulnerable adult abuse charges against her mother and believe she may have fled back to Virginia, where she is from. They’re also seeking the identity of the woman she was with that morning.
“So, for her to have been left somewhere like that? No words,” Takai’s actual aunt, Kesha Crute, told WTVR. “In essence, in my mind, she was left for dead basically. She couldn’t fend for herself if an animal or something, I thank God that he put the right people in her path.”
Kesha Crute said she didn’t know about Takai’s abandonment until late May when she ran across news articles with pictures. For a time, Takai was listed as a “living Jane Doe.”
Keisha Crute said she is working with Michigan authorities to gain custody and bring her niece back to the Richmond area.
“We want to know why, and you need to be held accountable for your actions,” she said. “It’s a lot of ifs, but if you were tired of taking care of her, you have family, she had family. You could have contacted us. We would have taken her. That’s what we’re prepared to do now. It didn’t have to come to this at all.”
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[Featured image: Takai, left, and Angela Crute/Michigan State Police]
