Tennessee man charged with traveling to Kentucky for sex with a 12-year-old girl
A Tennessee man who allegedly traveled to Kentucky to have sex with a 12-year-old girl has been charged with kidnapping in federal court.
A grand jury indicted Noah Austin Foote, 20, on charges of kidnapping a minor, traveling to Kentucky with the intent to have sex with a 12-year-old and using the girl to engage in sexually explicit conduct to make visual images.
State police arrested Foote in early October after he allegedly took the girl from her home in Leslie County.
Trooper Chad Daniels said in a citation that the girl’s father told him family members heard a loud noise after the girl was supposed to be in bed, and found she had left the house.
Neighbors reported seeing a white Ford pickup truck leaving the area at the time the girl went missing.
State police put out an alert for the truck, and eventually received a call that police in London had stopped the truck and Foote and the girl were inside.
When he went to interview the girl, she said she was running away from home because she was stressed, Daniels said in the citation.
Foote told police he had been in contact with the girl on Instagram for at least two months, and knew she was 12 years old, according to the citation.
Foote said the girl told him she was being verbally abused at home, and that his plan was to take her back to Tennessee to live with him and his parents. He lived near Memphis, in far western Tennessee.
In a motion seeking a reduced bond in the local case in Leslie County, a defense attorney said Foote was a graduate of a Christian school and had done general labor since finishing high school, but was unemployed at the time he was arrested.
Foote was released on bond on the state arrest, but is now in custody in Western Tennessee, according to the federal court record.
He faces up to 30 years in prison on the most serious charge.
