Cole Johnson has always wanted to go to California to skateboard.
The 13-year-old decided that Friday night was as good a time as any.
After an attempt at "making amends" with his mom at their Northeast Side apartment, police detectives said, he grabbed the keys to her BMW sedan and one of her credit cards and hit the road. He picked up his friend Raheem Harris, also 13 and of Franklinton, along the way.
"Every kid says what they want to do when they grow up," said detective L.M. Perry, of the Columbus police missing-persons unit. "I don't think the family realized he meant right now."
Missing-persons reports were filed for the boys on Friday night, and Cole's mom, Catherine, reported the 2008 BMW missing from her apartment the next day. She cut off her credit card, but not before the boys had bought gas in St. Louis on Saturday night.
Sunday night, a "runaway" letter was found in Cole's apartment announcing his plans to go to California, Perry said.
The midsummer road trip was cut short yesterday morning, when someone spotted the BMW parked oddly in a downtown alley of Kansas City, Mo., 669 miles from Cole's apartment, and called police. Police, who were on the lookout for the car and the runaways, found the boys sleeping in it at 7:30 a.m.
Cole and Raheem were taken into custody without incident. "There was no drama," said Capt. Steve Young of the Kansas City police.
It wasn't the first time Cole had driven his mom's car. Gahanna police pulled him over last month on Granville Street, about 4 miles from his apartment. He was charged with a delinquency count of driving without a license and providing false information to a police officer, according to Franklin County Juvenile Court records.
Detectives aren't sure yet what the boys did during their weekend jaunt; "a good deal of driving," Perry surmised. They did find time to post Facebook updates, including two posts by Cole on Sunday afternoon saying he was headed to California and, later, that they were stuck in Kansas City without any gas.
The car was towed, and the boys were turned over to Jackson County Family Court. Cole's mother was flying to Kansas City yesterday to retrieve the boys.
Johnson said authorities told her the boys would not be charged in Kansas City.
Johnson said she has submitted a complaint over how Columbus police initially handled the case because she thinks they took hours too long to get it filed and alert other authorities. A Columbus police spokesman said he was unable to confirm late yesterday that a complaint had been filed, but he said officers followed the typical steps for dealing with such cases.
Dispatch reporters John Futty and Jim Woods and the Associated Press contributed to this story.
@allymanning
Copyright 2012 - The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio
