Inset: Abdul “Aziz” Khan in 2017. Left: Rabia Khalid. Right: Elliot Bourgeois (Douglas County Sheriff’s Office).
Police in Colorado recovered a now-14-year-old boy more than 7 years later and 1,400 miles from where his noncustodial mother kidnapped him.
Deputies with the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office were called on Feb. 23 to a home on Kelliwood Way in Highlands Ranch, just south of Denver, after the owner spotted two people on surveillance cameras who had entered their property without permission. The home was vacant and for sale.
When deputies arrived on scene, they found two kids sitting in a car. They then saw a man and woman walk out of the house, according to a press release issued Wednesday. The couple claimed they were associated with the real estate agent but their story didn’t add up, deputies said. For four hours the cops worked to identify the pair who had given them false names.
They uncovered what Sheriff Darren Weekly called a “remarkable story.” It turned out that the woman’s name was 40-year-old Rabia Khalid. She had an active arrest warrant for kidnapping her then-7-year-old son in November 2017 in Atlanta. Abdul Aziz Khan, now 14, was one of the children in the car.
According to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), Khalid was supposed to appear at a custody hearing in Atlanta on Nov. 27, 2017, but instead disappeared with Abdul and her new husband Elliot Blake Bourgeois — the now-42-year-old man with her at the home in Colorado last month.
Abdul, who went by his middle name Aziz, was at the center of a nasty custody dispute between his mother and father after they separated in 2014, NCMEC reported. When it became clear that Khalid may lose custody, the trio fled Georgia and seemingly vanished, authorities said. Khalid and Bourgeois allegedly got rid of their phones and deleted their social media accounts.
“They did not show up at work one day, just out of the blue,” Deputy U.S. Marshal Brian Fair told NCMEC. “They fell off the map.”
It’s unclear how they’ve evaded authorities for all this time, but it wasn’t for a lack of trying. The U.S. Marshals have searched 11 states since they assumed the investigation in 2020. The family had moved around a lot.
“We believe that they have been all over the country,” said Weekly.
Cops arrested Khalid and Bourgeois on charges of second-degree kidnapping, forgery, identity theft, providing false information to authorities and trespassing.
As for the kidnapped teen, authorities are still working on the process to reunite him and his father. The boy, and the other child whom police have not publicly identified, are seemingly healthy and in good condition. Deputies are still trying to figure out if he knew he had been kidnapped by his mother. But it appeared he had been “coached” about what to say if approached by cops, Weekly said.
The family had been living in Aurora, another Denver suburb, at the time of the arrests. It’s unclear what led them to Colorado.
Khalid and Bourgeois are in the Douglas County Jail on a $1 million bond.
“Our deputies responded to what initially seemed like a routine trespass call, but through sharp attention to detail and tenacity, they uncovered the truth,” Weekly said. “Their ability to recognize the discrepancies in the suspects’ story and to follow the leads, even when the situation seemed unclear, ultimately led to the safe recovery of a child who had been missing for seven long years.”
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