CLEVELAND, Ohio — A Cuyahoga County judge found a 65-year-old man guilty of abducting a boy at a Strongsville ice rink last summer.
Common Pleas Judge Michael E. Jackson handed down the conviction against Martin Schellentrager at a bench trial that ended Tuesday. The judge acquitted Schellentrager of a felony kidnapping charge that would have carried a possible 11-year prison sentence for the incident that happened July 10 incident at Iceland USA.
Jackson will sentence Schellentrager on March 10. He faces a maximum of three years in prison.
Schellentrager was indicted on a single kidnapping charge after Strongsville police arrested him in his boxers outside the Holiday Inn on Ohio 82.
Witnesses called police after they said a man with no pants or shoes wrapped his arms around a 10-year-old boy in the lobby of the building and started pulling him toward the front doors.
The two made it about 20 feet before the boy’s father intervened and grabbed his son, prosecutors say. Schellentrager walked outside where police arrested him.
Employees of the ice rink, a witness, the boy and his father all told the officers that Schellentrager tried to drag the boy out of the rink, according to court records.
The boy, his father, a witness and two officers testified at the two-day trial last week.
Prosecutors last week asked Jackson to consider lesser-included charges of abduction, a third-degree felony, and criminal child enticement, a first-degree misdemeanor, when Jackson began deliberating on the kidnapping charge.
Jackson said Tuesday that prosecutors did not prove that Schellentrager’s actions caused the boy serious physical harm, a key element of the kidnapping statute.
Schellentrager committed the enticement, Jackson said, but his actions amounted to more than just the soliciting or luring of a child and involved physical restraint, so he applied the abduction charge.
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