Kidnapped lawyers freed after ordeal

Arman Deganian, his brother and their friends had just called it a night after a party in east Atlanta and gone their separate ways.

At 3:04 a.m., Deganian was making a sandwich when his phone started vibrating in his pocket.

The text message on the screen read: "We have been kidnapped. Please call the police and help us."

Deganian's heart dropped. He knew his brother, David, wasn't playing a joke.

"I didn't even think for a second he would do that to me," Deganian said.

Arman Deganian called his brother. The phone rang five times and went to voicemail. He sent a text message to David Deganian's phone. "Where are you?" he asked.

Then he began to get frantic.

The brothers and about a dozen other people had been at a housewarming party and walked to a nightclub just blocks from the house. David Deganian, 26, and a friend, Herman Hoying, 28, stayed behind to pay a bar tab as everyone was leaving around 2:30 a.m. Sunday, Arman Deganian said.

But David Deganian and Hoying never made it to the house. The two attorneys told police they were walking to Hoying's truck when they were confronted by four men wearing bandanas across their faces and wielding guns.

The pair said they were stripped of their wallets, keys and cash before they were stuffed into a stolen car and taken to an empty town house where they were held at gunpoint for more than 14 hours.

In their haste, the robbers missed seizing the young lawyers' cell phones.

"The whole time, they had the guns and said not to look at them," David Deganian told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "I thought that this was how it was going to end for me."

His brother said he called police within 10 minutes of getting the desperate text message.

"They got those messages out, and the brother kept it going," said Atlanta homicide detective David Quinn. "He was really ringing the bell down here."

Arman Deganian felt helpless. He had to tell his parents that his younger brother was missing. For hours, he waited for police to call with updates on the investigation.

"Other than the text message, we had nothing," Arman Deganian said.

Hoying had tried to call 911, but his attackers heard him whispering in the trunk of the car. Realizing their mistake, they took the phones away.

Dispatchers couldn't understand Hoying on the phone, but by tracing the call, authorities were able to confirm where the two men had been abducted.

Nearly 12 hours after his first phone call to police, Arman Deganian got a call from a detective who told him two suspects had been arrested at a mall on Atlanta's west side using David and Herman's credit cards. Herman's truck had also been found.

The suspects, Christopher McFarland and Christopher Maddox, were in the middle of a shopping spree, where they had already spent hundreds of dollars on clothes, Quinn said.

"They were loaded down as if it was Christmas in the summertime," Quinn said.

"I asked, what about my brother and Herman?" Arman Deganian said.

The detective told him the police didn't know where the young lawyers were.

"At that point, I just assumed that they were dead," Arman Deganian said. "I didn't even bother calling my mom. I was just going to wait until I actually heard the bad news."

At 4 p.m., police called again. Holding his phone in one hand and a bottle of water in the other, Arman Deganian stood up from the couch and braced for the worst.

"We found them. They're OK," the detective told Arman Deganian.

He dropped his water bottle. His friends in the room assumed their fears had been confirmed. When Arman Deganian saw their hands over their mouths, he shared the good news.

"It was unbelievable," he said. "I had given up at that point that anything positive was going to happen."

The two attorneys were found unharmed in an abandoned home in south Atlanta. Police Department spokesman Eric Schwartz said McFarland and Maddox were charged with armed robbery and kidnapping.

"These young men were on a hunt for any victim that they could benefit monetarily from," Quinn said. "That's it. There weren't going to be any ransom notes. They probably felt pretty confident that because (Hoying and Deganian) were in their custody, nothing would be reported stolen."

Police credited the kidnapped men for not panicking during their ordeal.

"Mr. Hoying and Mr. Deganian solved this crime," Quinn said. "Without them, we would've had an unsolved mystery. Most of my kidnappings end in death."

Authorities are still investigating what happened during the hours the men were missing, and are still seeking two additional, unnamed suspects who may have fled just before authorities rescued the hostages.

Meanwhile, David Deganian said he was still in a daze after the kidnapping.

"I am still in shock a little bit," the 26-year-old public defender said. "I didn't think I was gonna get out of it."

For Arman Deganian, the experience is still sinking in.

"The biggest thing to take away from it is that it can happen anywhere, anytime," he said. "They did everything right. We were in a big group. No one was by themselves. We were in a well-lit area.

"You just can't be cautious enough," he added. "It was just a case of wrong place, wrong time. Bad people are going to do bad things."