Columbia Heights Public Schools

In a statement posted on Thursday, the Department of Homeland Security said that agents detained five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos earlier this week because his mother declined to take custody and his father requested that the child remain with him after he was apprehended.

Columbia Heights School Board Chair Mary Granlund, however, said that another adult at the scene of the detention signaled that they could take Liam.

“I heard, ‘What are you doing? Don’t take the child’…There was another adult who lived in the home that was there saying, ‘I will take the child, I will take the child,’” said Granlund, who witnessed part of the incident. “Somebody else was yelling, they saw that I was there and said, ‘School is here. They can take the child. You don’t have to take them.’”

“There was ample opportunity to be able to safely hand that child off to adults,” said Granlund, who did not specify who the other adult in the home was. Granlund said she offered to take Liam as well, to no avail.

Granlund and Superintendent Zena Stevnik added that they have provided support to Liam’s mother, but have not spoken with her about the DHS claim that she refused to take custody. Liam’s father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, had stressed that she shouldn’t open the door as agents were detaining him, Granlund said.

“I would infer that the mother was probably fearful to open that door,” Stevnik said.

Stevnik also noted that the school would not have taken custody of Liam, but that they could have taken him back to preschool and identified who to contact if a parent wasn’t available.

“When I exited my vehicle, I immediately said, ‘Where is the child, where is the child? That’s what I was there to do, is to collect the child and return them safely to school,” said Stevnik.

Stevnik raised questions, too, about DHS’s claims that Conejo Arias had “fled” the scene.

“Everything I’ve heard is that he was handcuffed in the driveway. What we saw when we arrived on scene was the father’s car in the driveway still running. So the car wasn’t turned off,” she said.

DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.