Kidnapping suspect has criminal history including attack with baseball bat, animal cruelty allegations

The suspect in an Arkadelphia kidnapping case hadn’t been out of jail long when he allegedly beat a woman and took her and their child against their will.

Michael Earnest Sloan remained in custody Friday at the Clark County Detention Center following his arrest Feb. 12 in Hot Springs. He was arrested without incident and is being held on police charges of kidnapping and domestic battery. It wasn’t immediately clear when he would go before a judge for a first appearance.

Sloan, 39, has a criminal history, according to court documents filed in two Arkansas counties.

Sloan was sentenced in December 2025 to one month in a Jefferson County (Pine Bluff) jail for a felony charge of disorderly conduct. He was the prime suspect in a 2024 home invasion case in which he used a baseball bat to break into a camper inhabited by two people whom he alleged had stolen his pickup truck the day before. Sloan also maced the residents while they were inside the camper, according to court documents filed in that county. Deputies arrested the theft suspects, as well as Sloan, who was charged with two counts of aggravated assault, breaking or entering, and disorderly conduct. 

Prosecutors in Jefferson County dropped all but the disorderly conduct charge.

Weeks before his sentence, in November 2025, Sloan had been accused in the Central Arkansas town of Morrilton (Conway County) of stealing a vehicle, felony criminal mischief, and cruelty to animals. Court documents in that county indicate that Sloan, on the day he was discharged from a rehabilitation facility, stole a Jeep Wrangler in a Walmart parking lot. Inside the vehicle were two dogs. The Jeep was located on Interstate 40, abandoned, within an hour of the initial report, as a motorist saw one of the dogs outside the vehicle and, fearing it would be run over, stopped to usher it back to safety. Finding the owner’s number on one of the dogs’ tags, he called the owner. Meanwhile, detectives reportedly connected Sloan to the rehab center’s discharge list, and his photo matched the suspect seen on Walmart’s surveillance footage getting into the Jeep.

The Conway County case remains open.