Federal prosecutors allege that Zapata-Landeros intended to run the mother’s car off the road in the Tustin Hills area as she took her children to school. He told the informant he would then demand a $300,000 ransom, threatening to cut off two of the child’s fingers and send them to the family if they refused to pay.<\/p>\n
He also told the informant he had done security work for the family in the past. The name of the family was not provided in court records, and Zapata-Landeros could not be reached for comment.<\/p>\n
The FBI conducted the investigation with the Westminster Police Department. Westminster officers and FBI agents arrested Zapata-Landeros on March 16 about 100 yards from the potential victim’s home. The suspect\u00a0was charged in federal court with solicitation to commit kidnapping for ransom.<\/p>\n
[Updated at 3:59 p.m.: <\/strong>An earlier version of this post said the arrest was made about 100 miles from the potential victim’s home.]<\/p>\n — Andrew Blankstein<\/p>\n Photo: Cesar Ariel Zapata-Landeros. Credit: FBI<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A onetime Tijuana police officer was arrested on suspicion of plotting to kidnap the child of a wealthy Orange County family, authorities said. Authorities said the suspect, Cesar Ariel Zapata-Landeros, told an informant that he had planned the kidnapping, going as far as to rent a storage garage where he claimed he would keep the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4131,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-496483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/496483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4131"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=496483"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/496483\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=496483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=496483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=496483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}