A 12-year-old girl and her 14-year-old friend have made national headlines after their families requested for missing child alerts to be issued only for it to be found that the children went on a long-distance joyride from Florida to Louisiana.
On Apr. 6, the two girls were reportedly heading to Louisiana from their hometown of Lake Butler, Florida to see someone they met online, according to Chief Deputy Capt. Lyn Williams with the Union County Sheriff’s Office. As they were about to cross state lines, they turned themselves in after they saw their faces on TV.
It is unclear how old the person they were planning to meet was.
The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children for Florida, Georgia, Alabama and Louisiana all issued alerts the morning they went missing, Williams said, who added that there is no suspicion of foul play and no adults were with them during the trip.
The pair were reportedly at a gas station when they saw themselves in a missing children alert on TV. They then headed to the local authorities to turn themselves in. That same day, the Union County Sheriff’s Office canceled the alert and said that the girls have been found safe in Bayou La Batre, Alabama, approximately 400 miles from their hometown.
While the girls went missing, the FBI and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement got involved in attempting to locate them.
There were some “suspicious circumstances” that raised “red flags” about the person the girls were going to meet, according to Williams. The matter was subsequently turned over to the FBI.
“Every 40 seconds, a child goes missing or is abducted in the United States. Approximately 840,000 children are reported missing each year and the F.B.I. estimates that between 85 and 90 percent of these are children,” according to Child Crime Prevention & Safety Center. “While most reports of missing or abducted children are resolved within hours, many involve situations where a child goes missing permanently or for an extended period of time.”
