‘In broad daylight’: Costco mom loses sight of her baby’s cart for seconds. Then her heart drops when she sees a stranger walking away with the cart
A mother can look away from a shopping cart for only a few seconds. But when a 4-week-old baby is inside, that is enough time for panic to set in. One Idaho mother says she learned that at Costco when she turned around and found both her cart and newborn gone.
She quickly spotted a stranger walking away with the cart and got her baby back. But after what happened on a Costco trip with her child, she found the encounter difficult to dismiss. She began wondering whether it had really been a mistake.
A video posted by @bestcrimestories25 on TikTok shows the police questioning that followed. Natalie Millett told officers that the more she thought about the encounter, the less accidental it felt. The man pushing the cart, however, had a very different explanation.
Then came the question he wasn’t expecting
Investigators identified the man as 24-year-old Michael Garrison Raine. During questioning, Raine initially described what sounded like a normal Costco visit. He remembered buying milk and a pumpkin pie, getting some samples, and using the self-checkout.
Police asked whether Raine had noticed anything strange or out of the ordinary during his Costco trip. “I can’t say I remember anything in particular that stuck out to me,” he responded. Raine added that he sometimes put in his AirPods and “might have not been paying too much attention” to what was happening around him.
Then investigators told him they were looking into an incident involving a child allegedly being taken. That immediately brought back a memory. “Oh, that. I am so sorry. I remember that now,” Raine responded in the footage.
Raine recalled looking for a book his roommate might enjoy when he began moving what he thought was his cart without looking inside. He claimed he only realized his mistake when Millett approached. “I felt awful,” he recalled. “I started apologizing. I apologized two or three times to her.”
Investigators were not immediately convinced. They questioned how Raine could have failed to notice the large child carrier inside the cart. They also wanted to know why he had remembered details about milk, pumpkin pie, and samples but initially failed to mention accidentally walking away with someone’s baby.
Raine told officers that he did remember the encounter but had not wanted to think about it because he felt bad. “It was something really messed up,” he said, adding that nobody should have to go through something like that.
Millett had her own concerns about what happened. She told police she initially felt grateful simply to have her baby and cart back, but the encounter bothered her more as she processed it. “I don’t think that was unintentional,” she said. “I think that was pretty calculated.”
Millett asked police to review Costco’s surveillance footage and membership records to determine who the man was. She worried he could be targeting mothers with young children.
After several hours of questioning, Raine began asking whether he was free to leave. Police eventually told him he was being arrested for second-degree kidnapping. Raine appeared confused and repeatedly questioned how he could be guilty of kidnapping when he maintained that taking the cart had been a mistake.
The case did not end with his arrest. Prosecutors later reviewed additional Costco footage showing Millett reaching Raine shortly after he moved the cart. Raine then remained in the store, continued shopping, and went to the food court.
Bonneville County Prosecutor Randy Neal ultimately dismissed the kidnapping charge, finding insufficient evidence to prove criminal intent beyond a reasonable doubt. Raine maintained that he accidentally grabbed the wrong cart, and prosecutors determined they could not prove otherwise.
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