Video: Truck, Ransom Note Found | News Conference

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Clay Moore was kidnapped for ransom, Manatee County Sheriff Charlie Wells said this morning in announcing that an arrest warrant has been issued for the man believed to be responsible.

Wells said the 13-year-old’s suspected abductor is Vicente Ignacio Beltran-Moreno, who is believed to have fled the state.

“This was an absolute kidnapping for ransom,” Wells said, noting that a ransom note has been recovered. He also showed a photo of a red pickup truck the suspect is said to have used in the kidnapping. “The person wanted money in exchange for Clay Moore,” Wells said.

Police early this morning raided the suspect’s home at 3719 17th St. Court East, in Bradenton. The truck was there but the man was not.

Moreno, 22, is Hispanic, 5-foot-5 and weighs 140 pounds, according to a Manatee Sheriff’s Office release. He has brown eyes, brown hair and goes by the nickname “Nacho.”

Moore on Saturday showed detectives the thicket of woods where a man bound and gagged him during a brazen daylight abduction a day earlier. He has been helping authorities piece together a timeline and flesh out clues to narrow the search for the man who snatched the boy at gunpoint from a bus stop Friday.

Relatives on Saturday said the Parrish boy is doing well. His friends and family are thankful he was not injured during his nearly five-hour ordeal Friday.

Authorities questioned migrant workers who live in trailers on farms in eastern Manatee County to glean any information they might have. Sheriff’s deputies showed them fliers bearing a sketch of the suspect.

Wells oversaw witness interviews Saturday in an office about a mile from the woods where Clay’s abductor bound the boy with duct tape and tied him to a tree.

“This is a slow process, running down leads,” Wells said. “We’re still trying to make sense of this whole thing.”

Wells said detectives were following several leads, but he declined to discuss details of the investigation.

Questions linger about why the man chose Clay and why he left the boy alone in the woods, more than 20 miles from his home in the Kingsfield Lakes community in Parrish.

Wells thinks the abductor is familiar with Manatee County and that the man purposely brought Clay to a destination in the woods.

Clay wriggled out of his bindings to freedom using a safety pin taken from his abductor’s pickup, relatives said.

The boy wandered through woods not knowing where he was, authorities said.

A farmworker was refueling a tractor Friday afternoon when the skinny teenager emerged from dense woods, lost, scared and hungry.

The farmworker spoke broken English. Clay wanted a cell phone. He called his mother about 1:30 p.m., more than four hours after he was taken from Old Tampa Road at Douglas Hill Place in Parrish.

Saturday morning, Clay directed law enforcement officers to his position in the woods. Wells, who met Clay for the first time Saturday, told the boy he was proud of his strength.

Authorities all-around praised Clay, who waited a while after his abductor drove away before freeing himself from the duct tape.

“It sends chills up my spine to think he was out there,” sheriff’s Sgt. William Riley said Saturday. “He was the reason we found him.”

Riley was among the deputies who first met up with Clay after he escaped from the woods along State Road 64 near the Kibler Ranch.

The boy was relieved when deputies arrived, Riley said. Clay guzzled a bottle of water and downed a McDonald’s lunch that a deputy gladly gave up.

Clay was reunited with family members at Manatee Memorial Hospital, where authorities took the boy for an evaluation. He suffered minor cuts during the abduction.

Clay, a student at Manatee School for the Arts in Palmetto, and his family are trying to return to some kind of normal routine.

His best friend spent much of Friday evening at the Moore house. Clay fielded calls from relatives.

“I just told him that I loved him so much,” said one of Clay’s grandmothers, Rebecca Kelle, who lives in Indiana. “He proved himself to be very brave. We thank God nothing more happened. We were just thrilled how he kept his wits.”

Sheriff’s deputies are expected to step up patrols in the Kingsfield community. Parents vowed to be fixtures at neighborhood bus stops in the coming weeks.

On Saturday, Aimee Smith was at a Kingsfield Lakes playground with her youngest children - her 2-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son - chatting with a neighbor about the abduction.Smith said she will no longer let her children play unsupervised."You watch your children, but you tend to be lax until something happens,” said Smith, 30. “I believe in talking to the kids. I tell them you’re safe when you’re near Mommy and Daddy. But they need to know that there are bad people out there.”

MICHAEL A. SCARCELLA of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune contributed to this report.

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