Rockville woman charged with kidnapping in school incident
Police say she pulled a 6-year-old boy into the parking lot of Lakewood Elementary
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Montgomery County school officials are promising to review their safety policies after police charged a Rockville woman with kidnapping a 6-year-old boy at Lakewood Elementary School in Rockville Tuesday.
Rockville City Police said 39-year-old Xuhua Huang of Alta Springs Way pulled a kindergarten student by the wrist from inside the school, past the main office and out to the parking lot around 11 a.m. A parent volunteer who saw what was happening intervened and the boy was let go unharmed, police said.
Huang and her husband had been called to the school to pick up their 6-year-old daughter, who was not feeling well. While there, Huang seized the boy from the hallway and pulled him out to the parking lot, police said. Huang's daughter is also in kindergarten.
"We're reviewing the training of our front-office staff," said Dr. Sherry Liebes, community superintendant for the Thomas S. Wootton school cluster, which includes Lakewood Elementary. "We want to make it so when a visitor comes in we make sure that visitor is engaged. We have a situation now where the line of sight [from the main office] might not be what we want it to be."
Huang is charged with kidnapping a child under 16, second-degree assault and false imprisonment. The maximum penalty for kidnapping is 30 years in prison, police said.
Online state court records did not list an attorney for Huang and other efforts to locate her lawyer were unsuccessful. No one answered the telephone listed for Huang's address.
According to police charging documents, Huang's husband told police that Huang felt "the school was not treating their daughter properly" and grabbed the boy in an "attempt to make someone else feel the way she did in regards to how her child was being treated."
Police redacted the name of the husband in the documents.
Police interviewed Huang, who is from China, at her home in Rockville Tuesday night, said Capt. Michael England of the Rockville City Police. They arrested Huang this morning and she was being held at the Montgomery County Central Processing Unit this afternoon.
Lakewood enacted Code Blue emergency procedures from the time of the incident Tuesday until 10:30 this morning, when Huang was arrested. A Code Blue, which restricts access to the school from the outside but not within, can be put in place by administrators when an emergency happens at or near a school.
"We're not 100 percent sure why she did this," England said. "It seems she took the child to see how the school would react."
England said that while Huang has a valid passport, he was not sure of her immigration status.
Robin L. Malcotti, Lakewood's principal, sent a letter home to parents Tuesday. In it, she assured parents of the school's commitment to safety.
"We have a shared responsibility for the safety of our school community, and I am particularly grateful for the way in which the parent volunteer took action when she saw that a student was being removed from the school building by an unauthorized person," she wrote.
She said having someone monitor the front door at all times is being considered along with many other options for increasing the level of safety at the school.
England commended the parent volunteer for her quick action and lauded the school's safety efforts.
"They do the best they can with what they have," England said.
Regardless of the outcome of the criminal charges, Huang has been banned from county school property for one year because of the incident, said Robert Hellmuth, director of safety and security for Montgomery County Public Schools.
The father of the boy said he is grateful Huang is in police custody and "unable to do anything like this again."
He added, "Half of our worries are dealt with; the other half is securing the school so something like this doesn't happen again."