Dalton, Ga., police arrest woman for lying to detective in custody dispute

Jenneffer Luke
Jenneffer Luke
photo Jenneffer Luke

Dalton, Ga., police arrested a woman this week for allegedly lying to them, scheming to throw her child's father in jail.

Jenneffer Michelle Luke, 41, told a detective that Aron Richard Reed sneaked away to Louisiana with their 1-year-old child. She said he was only supposed to take the child for an overnight trip to Cleveland, Tenn., and then he was suddenly halfway across the country. She said she wasn't even sure he was the child's father. She said she could only talk to him through Facebook, according to the incident report.

And then, she said, he deleted his account. She told the detective she had a lead, though. She had seen pictures of Reed, 28, with his new girlfriend in Princeton, La.

Local authorities went to the new girlfriend's house, Dalton police spokesman Bruce Frazier told the Times Free Press. There, however, Reed told the officers that Luke lied.

"He was able to provide some proof that her timeline was off," Frazier said, "and that prompted further investigation."

When Luke met with a detective on Nov. 2, she told him that Reed kidnapped her child 12 days earlier. The investigator asked her why she waited so long to report the crime. She said her friends advised her it was a civil dispute and she needed to find a lawyer. But then a lawyer told her she actually needed to talk to the police, according to the report.

"I asked her if there was anything else that she was leaving out on purpose that might put her in a bad light," a Dalton detective wrote in his report.

In fact, Luke and Reed's custody dispute began over the summer, not in October, according to police. Authorities in Bradley County, Tenn., told her she needed to solve the problem in civil court. But then someone told her the law was different in Georgia, which would give her a better chance of seeing Reed arrested over the whole problem, according to a Dalton police news release.

Luke admitted she lied to officers, according to an incident report. The department charged her with making false statements and the false reporting of a crime.

She was booked into the Whitfield County Jail on Wednesday, a month after she met with a detective.

"The investigation took some extra time to reach the point of charging her," Frazier said.

Contact staff writer Tyler Jett at 423-757-6476 or tjett@timesfreepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @LetsJett.

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