Man charged in multi-day abduction of woman in Akron
A 23-year-old woman from Chardon wearing torn, dirty clothes carefully stepped down a ladder from a cold overhead space in an unattached garage in Kenmore.
An Akron police officer led her to a stool and briefly shined a flashlight on her face, illuminating a swollen, blackened eye looking back at him. The other eye was swelled shut. Yellow and purple bruises tinged her puffy face.
“Do you guys have water or anything?” she asked the officers, her arms crossed against her chest before covering her swollen lips.
“We’ll get you some here soon,” an officer responded.
Akron Police Department body camera footage captured the moment last Monday morning when officers rescued a woman they said was being held against her will for four days.
She was taken to a nearby hospital, where she was treated for non-life-threatening injuries.
That morning, police arrested 33-year-old William Mozingo, who has a two previous Stark County convictions for kidnapping, in connection with the case.
Mozingo is charged with felonious assault, unlawful restraint, kidnapping, abduction, parole violation and escape, according to Akron Municipal Court.
He remained in the Summit County Jail on $100,000 bond Friday.
The case remains under investigation, police said.
Mozingo and the woman were found by a man who lives at the residence roughly nine hours earlier at 1 a.m. Monday.
Captured by body camera footage while talking to police, the resident explained the situation began when he went to replace their washing machine with a newer model.
Living with his wife’s elderly parents, who are often up at night, he decided to install the appliance at night, so he left the house and went to the unattached garage for a moving dolly.
“I was in there grabbing the dolly when I heard, ‘Bro,’” the man recounted to police. It was Mozingo.
The resident and his wife individually told officers they were once friendly with Mozingo but cut off all contact with him a few months ago. They did not know he had been in the garage.
While talking outside with Mozingo, the man recalled hearing a voice from the garage ask, “Can I come down now?”
About 30 seconds later, the resident heard the woman again. That’s when he went into the garage and saw her in an attic-like space, so he climbed up and saw her face.
“I’m so scared, I don’t know what to do,” he recalled her telling him.
“So, I just started bear-hugging her,” he said to police. “I told her, ‘We’ll get you home; I won’t drop you.’”
After talking to her in the garage, he went back into the house and spoke to his wife. Out of concern for their own child’s safety and making the immediate situation any worse, he decided to wait until the morning to call the police.
“I didn’t know how to handle this while keeping her safe and without getting anyone else [hurt],” he told police. “He wasn’t in his right state of mind. I wanted to make it look like I wasn’t doing anything so he wouldn’t get panicky.”
The residents of the property said Mozingo likely found the garage unlocked, as the wife’s 80-year-old father often uses it and forgets the key.
As for how Mozingo and the woman were there for four days without anyone realizing, the residents didn’t know.
“He couldn’t have been in there unless he got there late at night and left really early in the morning,” the husband speculated.
When police arrived at the scene at about 9:15 a.m., they found the garage closed and locked up. They called for Mozingo to come out. No response could be heard on the body camera footage.
After a few minutes, more police gathered around the side door entrance as one officer positioned himself with a long wooden tool to pry the door open.
“William, last chance,” an officer yelled. “Come out with your hands up.”
At that moment, the officer pried the door open as a canine unit walked onto the scene, and a barking dog lunged at the doorway. With their handguns drawn, police walked toward the opened door before Mozingo stepped out with his hands behind his back.
This is not Mozingo’s first kidnapping charge. He was imprisoned three times for kidnapping in the last decade.
The first incident occurred in 2014 in Adams County. The second was three years later in 2017 in Stark County.
The third time was again in Stark County in 2019, less than four months after he was released from prison for the second incident. This time, he was accused of abducting a woman, beating her and holding her against her will for several days until she escaped, the Canton Repository reported.
He was found guilty of kidnapping and aggravated assault in 2020 and was sentenced to 18 months in prison, according to Stark County Common Pleas Court documents.