Theft Suspect Used Her Infant As Human Shield

JULY 17--As a shoplifting suspect tried to flee from a Florida cop, she used her three-month-old daughter as a tiny human shield and announced, “You will have to shoot through the baby to get me!” police charge.

Ashley Taylor Wright, 23, allegedly walked out of a Dillard’s Monday evening with $261 worth of clothing hidden in a baby stroller. After being alerted to the theft by a store employee, an Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office deputy approached Wright as she got into the passenger side of a Nissan Pathfinder in the parking lot.

Wright, who had screamed at her husband to get in the car so they could leave, refused a deputy’s demand that she exit the car. At one point, she “grabbed a baby carrier and held it in front of her screaming, ‘You will have to shoot through the baby to get me!’” according to a sheriff’s report.

While Wright (seen in the adjacent mug shot) cursed and scremed at a deputy, two other small children--a two-year-old boy and a four-year-old girl--watched from the back seat.

The Pensacola resident then jumped out of the car and “began running away from it with the baby carrier,” which held her infant daughter. As a deputy closed in on her, Wright “threw the baby carrier…at me, about shoulder height,” the report notes.

After dodging the airborne carrier and the 14-pound baby, the deputy apprehended Wright, but not without a struggle. Wright, who was bleeding after she tripped and hit her head on the ground, shook her head from side-to-side, spraying deputies with blood. “Now you mother fuckers have my blood all over you bitches,” she remarked.

The baby was not injured during her brief takeoff and landing.

By the time she arrived for treatment at a local hospital, Wright had calmed down, telling deputies that she had consumed a few beers, which might have prompted her “night of bad decisions.”

While copping to stealing the clothing, Wright claimed “it was because her kids needed school clothes.” Wright, however, had stolen a woman’s shirt and two pairs of Miss Me jeans, not children’s garments.

Charged with felony child abuse, petty theft, and resisting an officer, Wright was booked into the county jail, where she remains locked up in lieu of $7000 bond. (3 pages)