A man has been arrested in connection with the kidnapping of 10-year-old Northridge girl, who turned up barefoot and wounded in Woodland Hills last week.
Daniel Martinez, 29, of West Hills, was booked into jail in connection with the case, the Los Angeles Police Department said during a press conference on Monday.
The case drew national headlines when a girl turned up outside a Woodland Hills coffee shop after having disappeared from her Northridge home 10 hours earlier.
The news comes two days after police announced they were searching for a man they said was their their primary suspect, Tobias Dustin Summers. Summers has not been caught.
Little was known about Martinez, but police said they gathered information over the weekend to make an arrest, said LAPD Commander Andrew Smith, a department spokesman.
Martinez was being held in the Los Angeles County Jail on a kidnapping charge. Police declined to discuss how the two suspects knew each other.
The search for Summers (pictured, below) has expanded to the San Diego area, Smith said. Smith said that Summers may have shaved his head to alter his appearance.
"The information on him being in San Diego is very new," said Smith, adding that detectives are still working to verify the lead.
The girl told police that two men took her from her bedroom sometime between 1 and 3:30 a.m. on Wednesday, police said.
She was taken to an abandoned house nearby and a storage unit before being dropped off in Woodland Hills.
She walked about a mile to a Starbucks where a passerby recognized her from media reports and alerted police, officials said.
She was found barefoot and with bruises and cuts on her face at 3 p.m. the same day she went missing, police said.
Police identified Summers on Saturday as the primary suspect in the case. Authorities said he has a lengthy criminal history dating to 2002 including arrests for assault and battery and kidnapping, was the primary suspect in the case.
Summers, 30, was released from prison in July 2012 under California’s AB 109, an initiative aimed at easing prison overcrowding. He was under the supervision of a probation officer, police said.
He's believed to be homeless and is known to frequent the North Hollywood and Devonshire areas.
He's described as about 6-feet tall, 160 pounds, with blue eyes and cropped blond hair.
Police said they do not believe the victim nor her family knows Summers.
