![]() ![]() He didn't buy "anything else of significance," the TBI said. The surveillance footage showed them entering the store together, where Cummins used cash to buy food. But there had been no other credible sightings. Investigators obtained images from surveillance cameras at a Wal-Mart in Oklahoma City showing Cummins and Elizabeth on the afternoon of March 15, two days after he allegedly abducted her. Gwyn said earlier this month, "This is not a fairy tale. The school report from January reads that neither one "admitted to behaving inappropriately towards the other." 23, according to a school district investigative report, but both denied the claim. One of Elizabeth's schoolmates reported seeing her and Cummins kiss in his classroom on Jan. According to authorities, after one of them would write a message, he or she would save the message as a draft, and the other person would log on, read the message and delete it. Investigators discovered email draft messages between Elizabeth and Cummins, which authorities said show a romantic relationship between them. "He searched what size mattress will fit in the back of a Nissan Rogue." "He was certainly putting a lot of planning into disappearing," Brent Cooper, the district attorney general for Giles, Lawrence, Maury and Wayne counties in Tennessee, told ABC News in an interview earlier this month. Three days before the alleged kidnapping, Cummins did an online search about his car "to determine if certain features could be tracked by law enforcement," according to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. He’s due to be sentenced on Monday, and faces a mandatory minimum of 10 years in prison and a possible life sentence, according to the Department of Justice.Cummins, a married father and grandfather, researched teen marriage online, specifically the age of consent, just eight days before he allegedly took Elizabeth. No matter what we do, we’ll have to deal with it.”Ĭummins pleaded guilty on April 5 to charges of transporting a minor across state lines and obstruction of justice, according to federal prosecutors. “It was an experience I’ll have to live with the rest of my life. “I don’t regret it, nor do I say it was the right thing to do,” she said, according to the Daily Herald. In an impromptu interview with the Columbia Daily Herald, a local newspaper, last September, Thomas told the paper’s editor she was still wrestling with a variety of feelings in the wake of her disappearance and eventual rescue. Following his arrest, Cummins admitted to having sexual contact with the teenage girl on “most” nights of their time on the lam. Police swooped in on April 20 and arrested Cummins after a tipster reported the pair’s location to authorities, NBC reported. They eventually made it to San Diego, where Cummins planned to kayak from Coronado Island across San Diego Bay to Mexico, but the older man scrapped that idea after taking a test ride and deeming the water too dangerous, CNN reported at the time.Ĭops finally caught up with the two living in a tiny cabin in Cecilville, California, a tiny, unincorporated community about 50 miles south of the Oregon border, where they had been passing themselves off as husband and wife, according to an NBC report at the time. ![]() The interview is Thomas’ first on-camera interview since her ordeal.Ĭummins’ predatory relationship with Thomas first came to light when a 12-year-old student at Culleoka Unit School in Culleoka, Tennessee, told administrators she had seen Cummins kissing Thomas, the Tennessean reported. “I didn’t wanna tell my parents that a grown man kissed me, and I didn’t wanna tell my friends that a grown man kissed me, because I don’t like having the spotlight on me,” she said in the interview clip, a preview of a longer interview set to air Friday night. Thomas, who was 15 at the time, said she had been homeschooled and had never had a boyfriend, and avoided telling anyone about the incident. ![]() “Whenever he first kissed me, that was when I realized ‘This is going too far,” she told Pilgrim. “You’d look pretty good naked,” Thomas said he told her.īut it wasn’t until he forcibly kissed her that she realized they had crossed a line. Thomas told ABC’s Eva Pilgrim she was sitting on a desk chatting with Cummins, 51, when out of the blue he came onto her. The Tennessee school teacher accused of kidnapping a teenage girl threatened her for weeks before finally coercing her to go on the run with him, t he girl said in an interview with ABC's 20/20.Įlizabeth Thomas, whose disappearance alongside teacher Tad Cummins last year prompted a massive search, told the interviewer Cummins paid her inappropriate compliments before cornering her in the classroom on the day he first kissed her. ![]()
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