Man Caught With Missing Children 19-Year-Old Charged With Rape, Three Counts Of Enticing Children

A 19-year-old Coeur d’Alene man was charged Thursday with rape, harboring a runaway and three counts of enticing children after deputies caught him with children who had been reported missing.

Joshua M. Lepinski is being held in the Kootenai County Jail on $210,000 bail.

“I can honestly say we’ve been to hell and back this week,” said the mother of one of the children Lepinski is accused of enticing.

The mother said her son, who just turned 12, disappeared Friday night while he was supposed to be spending the evening at a friend’s house.

She said her son and another boy spent the next day and a half with Lepinski, who had convinced them to come with him to some parties.

When her son returned home, he apparently was high on drugs, she said. She took him to the hospital the following day to have him tested for drugs because “he was screaming like he was on a bad acid trip.”

The woman’s son disappeared again Wednesday while he was supposed to be at school, she said. She reported her son as a runaway, and another woman reported her 13-year-old son missing.

Kootenai County sheriff’s deputies arrested Lepinski at Rustler’s Roost later that evening. He was at the restaurant with the two missing boys and another 12-year-old boy, according to a sheriff’s report.

Two of the boys told sheriff’s deputies that Lepinski had picked them up earlier in the day and had them hide from police in his car. The boys said Lepinski had planned to hide one of the boys in Montana to keep him away from his parents, according to the sheriff’s report.

“He told one child yesterday that if he told anybody what had happened that a being was going to come from the sky and disintegrate them,” the boy’s mother said.

Lepinski, however, told deputies he had planned to return the kids to their homes.

Lepinski also was charged Thursday with raping a 13-year-old girl.

The girl allegedly sneaked away from her home in October and met Lepinski at a Coeur d’Alene house where the two had sex, said Coeur d’Alene police Capt. Carl Bergh.

, DataTimes