TROY, Mo. (AP) — The attorney for a woman who helped stage a 6-year-old’s kidnapping says she and three others may be guilty of bad judgment but not criminal behavior.

Lawyer Charles James is representing the 58-year-old, whom authorities say helped plot the kidnapping with the boy’s mother, a 38-year-old woman and a 23-year-old man to teach him about stranger danger.

James tells the St. Louis Post-Dispatch the charges against the four are like taking care of a “small nail with a sledgehammer.”

James says all three women and the boy lived together in Troy. He says the child called his client and the 38-year-old his grandmother and aunt respectively, but they aren’t blood relatives.
Authorities say the man is the 38-year-old’s co-worker and lured the child into his vehicle last week.