Baby taken from LDS Hospital

The overhead speakers at LDS Hospital on Tuesday morning blared out the words "Code Pink" — not an uncommon announcement in any urban hospital along the Wasatch Front, where staffers regularly practice what to do if they hear that a newborn has been abducted.

But this was no drill.

A woman dressed in blue scrubs went into a patient's room about 11:20 a.m. and told a new mother that she was taking the baby boy for a circumcision. She said they'd be back within 20 minutes.

Instead, police say, she took the 3-day-old boy from the hospital.

But within the hour, Salt Lake police had made an arrest and the baby was back in his mother's arms.

"She said she didn't have a baby and she was (at the hospital) to get a baby," Salt Lake police detective Dwayne Baird said of the woman arrested.

Elizabeth Alarid, 39, was booked into the Salt Lake County Jail Tuesday for investigation of kidnapping. The Salt Lake City woman has anextensive criminal history, mostly involving felony thefts and traffic violations, and had been booked into jail 11 times, dating back to 1991, according to a check of jail and court records.

Here's how the story unfolded, with many of the details provided to media at a news conference Tuesday afternoon:

A woman who police say was Alarid flashed what looked like a hospital ID card at Tina Marie Archuleta, 21, and said she needed to take baby Zackaria, who had been born Sunday. She left with the baby and abandoned his bassinet by the elevator.

Staffers saw a woman walking with the baby in her arms and questioned her because that's not how babies are transported by staff, said Sandra Towns, director of Women's Services at the hospital. The woman identified herself as the baby's aunt and agreed to take the boy back to his mother.

But the baby was never returned to the room, Towns said. Meanwhile, the baby's mother was growing impatient and she asked staff where circumcisions were done. But Zackaria wasn't there.

"Yeah," Zackaria's father, Anthony Archuleta, Ogden, replied when asked if he was scared. "Everybody in this room would be scared if (this) happened to them. I didn't think that I was going to get him back. If she was in a car, he could've been gone."

The woman carrying Zackaria apparently went to the second floor, where she attracted attention because that's not a place where newborns are normally seen. Suspicious, two medical records staffers followed her out of the hospital, trailing her one block south and two east to the Smith's Food and Drug at 402 Sixth Ave.

At the same time, hospital security guard Jon Atherley was winding his way to the store, asking neighborhood residents if they had see a woman and a baby.

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