A baseball bat brawl in Greenwich Sunday morning led police to make some arrests in an alleged human trafficking ring Sunday morning.
Cops were called when the baseball-bat wielding group of men launched an attempt to rescue their family members, who had been kidnapped in Texas and were being brought to Connecticut for ransom, police said.
Police responded to the fight at the Riverside Commons strip mall at 11:30 a.m. but the men had left in four vehicles. Police later detained all four and learned that there might be a connection to an alert police had received from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency Sunday morning about a possible human smuggling case.
The family members, who live about 90 miles away in Willimantic, told investigators their relatives had been kidnapped in Texas, police said. They had agreed to meet the captors with ransom money, but showed up armed with baseball bats and rescued the three, police said.
Police also found the van in the ICE case. The suspects in the ICE case were believed to have kidnapped several people from Texas and were bringing them to Willimantic for ransom, police said.
"They said they were going to bring money, but they came with bats," a police spokesman told Greenwich Time reports.
Family members did free three of the victims and police apprehended one of the two suspects.
The investigation was turned over to I.C.E. The kidnapping suspect and the three victims were being held for questioning on immigration violation charges, police said.
Local
Sources said the three people who were kidnapped could have been smuggled in from Mexico.
