Elizabeth Thomas' Dad Slams Teacher Accused of Kidnapping His Daughter: 'He's a Little Boy'
Elizabeth Thomas father believes Tad Cummins is unequivocally a kidnapper - despite a claim by the 50-year-old former teacher’s lawyer that he didn’t force or coerce the teenage girl to flee with him from Tennessee more than a month ago.
“When you take a child who is underage and you have not gotten permission from their parents, that’s kidnapping,” Anthony Thomas tells PEOPLE.
“I don’t care who you are, who you think you are, he did not ask me if he could take my child,” Anthony adds. “My child at 15 [years old] is not able to make a decision for herself that she is going to take off somewhere across the country, no matter what world he lives in.”
On Monday, Cummins’ public defender, Benjamin Galloway, issued a statement defending his client, claiming he has “no history of violence and no criminal history whatsoever,” and that he didn’t coerce, force or threaten Elizabeth, Cummins’ former student at the Culleoka Unit School in Maury County, Tennessee.
Cummins - who authorities said faces kidnapping and sex crime charges in California and Tennessee as well as a federal charge - “surrendered without incident and has been cooperative with investigators,” Galloway said. “He looks forward to returning to Tennessee as soon as possible to answer the charges against him.”
Anthony tells PEOPLE he is anxious about how he will react if he is in the same courtroom as Cummins: “I’ll become emotionally charged and, yeah, I’d like to do to him ... what every other father would like to do in the same situation.”
“I’ll probably have to appear [at] some point in time to see him get justice,” Anthony says. “I really don’t know how I’m going to prepare.”
But he stresses, “At the end of the day, we have to put some faith and trust in the authorities. We can’t just go grabbing people as a mob, because then we’re not civilized anymore. We’re not better than he is.”
In a court petition filed in early April, while the pair was still missing the Thomas family claimed that Cummins “groomed” Elizabeth for months before her alleged abduction on March 13.
“Cummins preyed upon the child for months on end, nudging and molding her until her will to resist was conflicted and ultimately broken,” the petition alleged.
Cummins picked Elizabeth up from her home on more than one occasion to go out for a meal, “threatening her that if she did not go with him she would face repercussions at school,” the petition claimed.
Elizabeth “had an inflated view of Cummins,” believing he was “a millionaire, a former Special Forces soldier, and the like,” the filing stated.
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Anthony says that Cummins “tricked a lot of students.” He says many of them “[gave] me all kinds of problems. He’s a good guy! We love this guy!’ And they all still believed he was with the FBI and CIA and all this kind of stuff, and he never was.”
Cummins was fired from his job after he was named as the suspect in Elizabeth’s disappearance. Prior to that, he was suspended without pay after being accused of kissing the girl on school property earlier this year.
Anthony describes Cummins as “a grown man physically” - but, he says, “I think he’s a little boy with a big imagination, and that’s probably very charitable.”
Cummins and Elizabeth were discovered last week in a remote cabin in Cecilville, California, after a tipster saw the pair and contacted authorities on Wednesday night, according to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.
Prosecutors have accused Cummins of violating “a sacred position of public trust as a school teacher.”
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They alleged in court documents that he “planned and executed an audacious scheme to take a juvenile victim across the United States while evading law enforcement for the purposes of engaging in criminal sexual conduct.”
Cummins appeared in federal court in Sacramento, California, on Monday afternoon. He faces one federal count of transporting a minor with the intent to engage in sexual activity across state lines.
He has not entered a plea and was detained as a flight risk.
He will be transported to Tennessee “as soon as possible,” a U.S. Attorney’s Office spokeswoman said.
