Fugitive couple arrested in N.J.
By GRAHAM BRINK and MICHAEL KRUSE
Arthur and Lori Allain are accused of starving their foster daughter.
A Hernando County couple who skipped out on their child abuse trial in October were arrested Wednesday in Ocean County, N.J.
Lori and Arthur "Tommy" Allain were taken into custody on contempt of court charges and were being held at the Ocean County jail.
Sgt. Anthony Potter of the Dover Township Police Department said a detective was tipped that the Allains were staying in the area.
"He went out to the house, and they were there," Potter said.
Kristen Staab, Lori Allain's daughter in Spring Hill, said she was on the phone with her mother on Wednesday afternoon when the detective knocked on the door.
Staab has spoken to her mother on the phone several times, but both she and her mother have said she was kept in the dark as to where the couple were living.
"It was like, oh, my God, I can't believe I'm just sitting her and this is happening," Staab said in an interview with the St. Petersburg Times on Wednesday night. "She just said the cops are here."
The couple's four boys were apparently staying with Mrs. Allain's sister in Jackson, N.J., Staab said.
Lori Allain, 49, and her husband, Arthur "Tommy" Allain, 47, have been hiding out since Oct. 25, when they failed to appear in court for the start of their trial on charges that they starved their 10-year-old foster daughter, who at one point weighed 29 pounds.
In their first week on the run, in one of several telephone conversations with the Times, they said they were ready to turn themselves in through a pair of agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation office in New Port Richey.
But they would surrender only on the condition that their four biological sons, ranging in age from 12 to 16 years old, would be put with relatives. No one could make that guarantee.
"I would've been back immediately if they had allowed somebody in my family to take my children," Lori Allain said. "That day."
The FBI referred comment to the Hernando County Sheriff's Office. The Sheriff's Office confirmed those events Friday.
In other recent conversations with the Times, the Allains repeatedly said what they wanted and why they ran when they did.
They were looking for a guarantee, authorities said, that would never exist.
Law enforcement agencies have nothing to do with the custody of children.
The state Department of Children and Families can make recommendations, but the placement of children comes down to a judge's decision in a hearing.