Fort Bragg Soldier Charged With Kidnapping, Raping 12-Year-Old Girl

A Fort Bragg paratrooper is facing charges for kidnapping and raping a 12-year-old girl, and leaving a ransom note for her family in North Carolina, Craven County Sheriff’s Office said in a press conference Monday. The soldier, 19-year-old James Murdock Peele of Chesterfield, South Carolina, was charged with first-degree statutory rape, first-degree burglary, and first-degree kidnapping.

The incident came to light when the victim’s grandmother, who lives in the Carolina Pines area of Craven County, called the police Sunday morning. She informed them her granddaughter was nowhere to be found when she woke up that morning. The window of the preteen's bedroom was open and a ransom note was discovered on the bed, the girl’s grandmother said.

Detectives tracked the 12-year-old, and they found her with Peele in Fayetteville. Peele was arrested and the girl was rescued. Craven County Sheriff Jerry Monette said the ransom note which demanded money in exchange for the safe return of the girl "may have been some camouflage designed to throw authorities off.”

Lt. Col. Mike Burns of the 18th Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg confirmed that Peele was a private. Other details regarding the soldier were not made public. Capt. John Whitfield said Peele was friends with the girl on Facebook and this was the reason why investigators began looking at him.

“There’s probably some maturity factor issues there,” Whitfield said of Peele.

According to a report in ABC 11, Craven County Sheriff’s Office received help in solving the case and finding the girl from agencies in North and South Carolina, the FBI, U.S. Army CID, Secret Service, and other agencies. Monette said detectives worked very quickly on the case. They used cell phone tracking technology to find the girl within a time span of seven to eight hours since her disappearance was first reported by the grandmother. The police brought the rescued girl back to her grandmother Sunday night.

"My real worry in this kind of case is that once somebody meets a young lady like this, what happens afterward?" Monette said. "If this individual had even suspected that he might be at some point in time discovered what could have happened to this young lady is really scary."

"We cannot respect our children's privacy, because we live in a different day and time," he said, warning parents to monitor their children’s online activities. "There are those out there that will seek to take advantage of our children."

“Now, I will tell you that this case is relevant to internet chat rooms and conversations, and we want to make people specifically aware that you need to try to be on top of what’s going on with your child’s chat information on computers and also cell phones,” Whitfield said, according to a report in Army Times.

According to WRAL, an NBC-affiliated television station, Fort Bragg authorities said Peele might be returned to post at some point to face charges under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.