Suspect in little girl’s abduction was at her bus stop a day earlier, too, charges say

The man who kidnapped a 7-year-old girl from a school bus stop in Zimmerman, Minn., the afternoon of Jan. 21 had been contacting the mother on social media for a few weeks, according to a short interview with the mother on Friday, Jan. 23.

Authorities arrested 28-year-old Joseph A. Bragg of International Falls hours after the girl went missing, but not before he sexually assaulted her in a hotel room and had driven her more than 100 miles to the Albert Lea area, charges say. Law enforcement found the girl in the suspect’s rented pickup truck and reunited her with her mother.

“He had sought us out for a while,” said the girl’s mother, Mikailah Nelson.

Bragg was charged in Sherburne County District Court on Friday with one count of kidnapping and one count of first-degree criminal sexual conduct, both felonies. At a hearing Friday, a judge denied Bragg’s request for a public defender and set bail at $4 million with no conditions or $2 million with conditions Bragg be under GPS monitoring and have no contact with the alleged victim.

Nelson said in the interview that she wasn’t sure exactly when Bragg began watching her daughter, but said she believes it began after a neighbor “brought the creep” into the neighborhood in recent months. Bragg had online postings offering babysitting services and people sought to hire him.

Bragg at some point sent Nelson a friend request on social media, though they had never met in person, she said. Soon, more messages came, including one in which he asked Nelson if she needed a babysitter, she said.

Messages kept coming, with him asking her to dinner in one. In another, Bragg invited her and her daughter to an indoor pool, she said.

Nelson eventually blocked him, authorities said in court documents.

On the day the girl disappeared, she got off the school bus with other kids as normal around 4 p.m., just steps from where she lives in a townhome complex. But the girl never made it into her home.

Nelson said she believes Bragg was waiting at the end of a parking lot of the complex and lured her into his pickup.

It wasn’t until two hours later that Nelson realized her daughter was missing. Nelson’s older daughter thought the younger girl had been picked up by her grandmother.

Nelson called law enforcement about 6:30 p.m. Authorities characterized the girl’s disappearance as “a stranger abduction,” but also said that there was a “social media” tie, without elaborating. As word spread, hundreds of volunteers turned out to look for the girl.

Once information was shared with law enforcement agencies in the Albert Lea area, where Bragg was believed to be located, officials issued an Amber Alert. Police followed the vehicle from a gas station and pulled it over.

Officers saw the girl sitting in a booster seat in the back seat. Bragg was arrested just before 1 a.m. Thursday and declined to provide a statement to police.

Video footage from a neighbor shows the girl walking toward her house around the time of her abduction, then turning back toward the bus stop out of view of the camera, according to the criminal complaint.

Location data retrieved through the rental vehicle shows Bragg was in the Zimmerman area near the bus stop on the afternoon of Jan. 21, and was also in the vicinity the previous day, the complaint states.

Bragg reportedly used a ride-share to take the girl from a residence near Corcoran, Minn., to a hotel in Plymouth, court papers said. Hotel surveillance shows Bragg “entering the hotel alone but carrying a large red suitcase that appeared to be difficult for him to handle” and leaving about a half hour later.

In August, a family who used Bragg as a babysitter in far northern Minnesota filed for and was granted a harassment restraining order, according to court records filed in Koochiching County.

In the petition, the father says Bragg touched one of the children while in a swimming pool and forced his daughter to sleep with him in his camper. The children “both stated they do not feel safe around [the man] because of what he forced them to do,” the petition reads.

The father listed in the petition, Chase Williamson, told the Minnesota Star Tribune he met Bragg through a previous relationship with a woman who said her cousin, Bragg, had offered to watch their children while the parents were working.

“He said he could watch the kids whenever. He offered to do it for free. I didn’t like that and I paid him,” Williamson said. “He started to get kind of weird so I cut him off. I said, ‘Go away. Leave me alone. I don’t want you around my kids.’ And he kept trying to get ahold of me and see the kids. He would call and repeatedly text — just nonstop."

Bragg denied the allegations, according to a letter filed in Koochiching County District Court. The order was ultimately dismissed with the condition that Bragg have no contact with the children and that he stay at least 1 mile from the children’s home. The conditions are in place until Sept. 22, court documents show.

“It’s all over social media. A lot of moms are coming forward,” Williamson said, referring to posts sharing screenshots of parents’ conversations with the suspect where he offers to babysit. “He should be in prison.”

True “stranger abductions” — also called “stereotypical kidnappings” where the abductor is not related to or known by the child or family — are extremely rare, according to Alison Feigh, director of the Jacob Wetterling Resource Center.

Feigh was a classmate of Wetterling, the 11-year-old St. Joseph, Minn., boy who was abducted in October 1989 and missing for 27 years before Annandale resident Danny Heinrich admitted to kidnapping, sexually assaulting and killing him.

Feigh said she couldn’t comment on the Zimmerman investigation but said that in general, child molesters need three things to commit crimes: time, access and skill to trick people. Many people who abuse kids, she said, have ongoing access to children, including relatives, coaches or people in a family’s faith community.

“The less skill that they have, the harder it is for them to get time and access — so we often see that the ‘stereotypical kidnappings’ are the people who have a hard time getting access to children," she said. “People don’t trust them.

She also encouraged people to be leery of “stranger danger” — a concept that hasn’t been taught in decades.

“Most of the time it’s someone the child knows and when they do have an emergency, the people who are going to help them are almost always people the child doesn’t know,” she said. “You don’t want to scare them away from help.”

Most important to Feigh is that people don’t vilify the parents or children who were targeted.

“It just makes the victim of a crime feel worse and it doesn’t make us any safer,” she said. “The blame goes on the shoulders of the person who caused the harm.”