Mother, 2 children held in home against their will by West Jordan man


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WEST JORDAN — Chelsea Eddington was watching a movie with two of her daughters Friday when a loud bang inside the house disrupted their routine day.

"I really just thought it was a shelf that had fallen off of my wall," Eddington said.

She went downstairs to check out what happened and was confronted by the worst possible explanation for the noise: Someone was inside her house.

"I must have looked kind of frightened because he just told me, 'I'm not here to hurt you,'" Eddington said. "He didn't have a shirt, half his faced was bruised. … He looked like he had just been beaten up."

The man had been running through backyards near 2700 West and 7700 South around noon when he randomly picked Eddington's house to hide in, West Jordan police say.

It wasn't immediately clear why the man was in the area, but others had already called police and officers were looking for him. His name was not released Friday.

"I just offered if I could call the cops for him, and he kind of turned a little hostile and was like, 'No. Don't call the cops. Don't look out your window. You have to be quiet,'" Eddington said. "And when he said that, I knew I had to go call the cops."

The man, who police say was armed with a knife, allegedly followed Eddington as she went back to her bedroom, where her daughters — a baby and a 4-year-old — had stayed.

"I … texted my husband underneath my pillow to call 911," Eddington said. "(The man) just sat there with me for a while (and) kept telling me not to look out the windows, and of course I wanted to know what was going on outside."

Eddington was eventually able to peek out a window, where she says she saw "policemen everywhere." Soon afterward, police knocked at her front door. The man inside Eddington's home told her not to answer, but she did.

"The police officer asked me if there was somebody in my house, and I nodded my head yes," she said. "Then he asked me if I could talk, and I shook my head no, and that's when he ran upstairs and they arrested him in my bedroom with my two little kids watching."

West Jordan police officer Michael Harvie praised Eddington's handling of the situation.

"She kind of signaled to us without having to say a thing," he said.

The man, who has a criminal history involving robbery, was having a "drug-induced episode," Harvie said. He was arrested for investigation of kidnapping.

Eddington was able to keep her wits about her throughout the ordeal, she said, because she stayed focused on making sure it didn't become something worse.

"It was like an out-of-body experience," Eddington said. "I just knew that I had to stay calm because I didn't want it to escalate. I didn't want it to get violent, so I just sat on my bed and waited and prayed that somebody got my text message or that the police were on their way."

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Ben Lockhart

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