TOLLETTE — Authorities are searching for an Arkansas man suspected of abducting his 18-month-old daughter after crashing his car into the girl’s mother’s and then beating and stabbing the woman with an ice pick.
Arkansas State Police issued a missing child alert Sunday for Zahkairi Morrison. Witnesses told investigators that the girl’s father, 28-year-old Ralph Waldo Morrison III, drove head-on into her mother’s car near the town of Tollette on Sunday. The witnesses, who include two women that were in the car with the girl and her mother, Amaria Webster, said Morrison beat Webster and stabbed her in the shoulders and neck with an ice pick before fleeing with the child into some nearby woods.
Webster was treated at a hospital and released, Howard County Sheriff Butch Morris said Monday.
Authorities said Morrison fled to Columbus and then to Fulton by hitching rides from at least three motorists, and that they think he is now driving west toward Texarkana or California in an old Oldsmobile Cutlass four-door sedan. He is wanted in Sunday’s attack on four counts of aggravated assault and one count each of second-degree battery and kidnapping.
A spokesman for the sheriff’s department said there had been no reported sightings of the man or the girl as of 5 p.m. Monday.
No one answered repeated phone calls Monday to Morrison’s home.
Authorities say Morrison is 5 feet 8 inches tall, black and has tattoos on his arms and shoulders. Zahkairi is also black, has beads in her braided hair and was wearing a blue and pink shirt and shorts when she was taken. She is 2 feet tall and weighs 25 pounds.
