The parents of Carlee Russell, the Alabama woman who eerily disappeared last week before turning up at her home 48 hours later, spoke publicly for the first time since their daughter’s return on Tuesday—telling the Today show their daughter was abducted and left mentally and physically traumatized.
“We tried to hug as best we could, but I had to stand back because she was not in a good state,” Talitha Russell said of the moment her daughter, a 25-year-old nursing student, returned home on foot.
“So we had to stand back and let medical professionals work with her.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Talitha and her husband Carlos Russell have said Carlee was speaking to her sister-in-law on the phone about a child walking on the interstate in Hoover, Alabama, when there was a scream—and the phone went silent.
Police, who had also received a 911 call from Carlee about the child, later found her car abandoned—still running with her belongings inside.
Neither the family nor the police have provided any details about what happened to Carlee between the time she disappeared and her return two days later.
But her parents said she “absolutely” was abducted and that the kidnapper is still at large.
“There were moments when she physically had to fight for her life, and there were moments when she had to mentally fight for her life,” Talitha Russell said.
They asked the public not to speculate on the mystery.
“She’s having to deal with the trauma of people just making completely false allegations about her,” Talitha Russell said. “Carlee has given detectives her statement so that they can continue to pursue her abductor.”
Cops have stopped short of calling Russell’s disappearance an abduction, but told WVTM 13 that they are “following up on all information provided by Carlee.”
The chilling circumstances of Carlee’s sudden vanishing in a Birmingham suburb of nearly 100,000 people made headlines across the nation. Tips flooded in about the case, but Talitha said most of them were fake, called in by people who were “so evil.”
