Wichita man charged with attempted kidnapping of boy, 10, dies while awaiting trial
A Wichita man charged with trying to snatch a 10-year-old boy off of a south-side neighborhood street for sex has died while awaiting trial.
Webb Wray Ketcherside, who had been in the custody of the Sedgwick County Jail since his July 19, 2020, arrest, died Thursday at Ascension Via Christi St. Francis Hospital, where he was receiving treatment for an unspecified “serious chronic illness,” according to Sedgwick County Sheriff’s Office reports. The Sheriff’s Office said in a Friday news release that Ketcherside’s “health deteriorated” after his recent hospital admission, prompting his family to decide to decline further treatment.
He died at 5:16 p.m. Thursday from what appears to be natural causes, the office said in the news release.
The death is the jail’s first of an inmate in 2022.
Ketcherside, 64, was awaiting trial on one count of aggravated indecent solicitation of a child and one count of attempted kidnapping for an alleged abduction attempt where police said he sexually propositioned and grabbed the wrist of a boy walking alone to the Kellogg and Broadway area QuikTrip to buy a drink.
The boy later told officers the sweat on his wrist from the hot summer day helped him slip out of his would-be kidnapper’s grasp; he darted to the QuikTrip for help and identified Ketcherside for police who drove him home, according to an arrest affidavit released by a Sedgwick County judge in 2020.
Ketcherside, who had a 1998 sex crime conviction out of Smith County, pleaded not guilty to the local charges in November. Court records show his initial trial date, a control setting scheduled for Monday, would have been postponed.
