ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A federal appeals court has vacated kidnapping convictions in a case involving the death of a 3-year-old boy who went missing from Georgia in 2017 and later turned up dead at a squalid compound in New Mexico.
A panel of the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in a decision issued Tuesday that there was no evidence of a federal kidnapping crime when the family took the boy, noting that no court order or state law made it illegal for Siraj Ibn Wahhaj to take his son. The group already was living in New Mexico when a Georgia juvenile court issued a pickup order for the boy after his mother petitioned for emergency custody. The appellate panel took issue with jury instructions that implied the mother’s lack of consent could satisfy the unlawfulness element under the federal kidnapping statute. The family members can’t be retried on the kidnapping charges, the panel ruled. Prosecutors alleged that it was under Leveille’s instruction that the family fled Georgia with the boy, ending up in a remote stretch of the high desert where they conducted firearms and tactical training to prepare for attacks against the government.
The boy’s father and other family members were sentenced to life in prison in 2024 after jurors convicted them in what prosecutors described as a “sick end-of-times scheme.
Prosecutors said it was tied to a belief that the boy would be resurrected and then instruct the family which corrupt government and private institutions needed to be eliminated.
Authorities raided the compound in 2018, finding 11 children and dismal living conditions. They also found 11 firearms and ammunition that were used at a makeshift shooting range on the property near the Colorado state line. In a complex case that took years to get to trial, jurors heard weeks of testimony from children who had lived with their parents at the compound, other family members, firearms experts, doctors and forensic technicians.
