A 30-year-old Metro Detroit mother is behind bars in Wyoming after allegedly abducting her 6-year-old son and leading police on a dangerous high-speed chase through the small town of Evanston, sending her SUV airborne twice before officers finally brought her down. Marisa Calliea now faces six charges after a four-day search that stretched from Oakland County to the Wyoming-Utah border.
According to FOX 2 Detroit, Calliea was supposed to return her son, Liam, to his father, Justin Malburg, during a scheduled custody exchange on September 3, but she never showed up. The Oakland County Sheriff’s Office issued a missing child alert, and Detective Riley James Walsh was named the lead investigator on missing-child flyers circulated while Calliea had an active bench warrant, according to a probable cause affidavit reported by Cowboy State Daily.
A break in the case came from an unlikely source hundreds of miles away. A Flock license plate reader camera in Northville, Michigan, captured Calliea’s gray 2014 GMC Terrain on Saturday, September 5, two days after she missed the custody exchange, as reported by WWJ-AM. The scan helped investigators trace her vehicle’s path before it crossed state lines into Wyoming, where she had allegedly used the names Maria Peters and Will Peters for herself and her son, per FOX 2 Detroit.
A Walmart Tip Leads Police to the Missing Boy
The case broke open on Monday, when an anonymous tipster reported seeing a woman and a 6-year-old boy enter a Walmart in Evanston, Wyoming, matching the description of the gray GMC Terrain. Evanston Police Officer Nikoli Knezovich was dispatched to the store at 9:49 a.m. and waited in the parking lot for roughly 30 minutes before confronting Calliea, according to the affidavit cited by Cowboy State Daily…