"Runaway’s parents seek to help others; Social media helped Wayland couple find runaway teen" by Bella English | Globe Staff, November 25, 2012
“Don’t look for me. I’m not lost. I’m found.”
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Middle school can be a difficult time, especially for girls, said Christina, 47. “Allie was struggling with the normal issues of being a teenager. I remember being miserable at that age.”
Allie found the suburbs boring, and her parents weren’t surprised when police learned two days into the search that she had taken a Peter Pan bus to New York....
Their search centered on New York, where surveillance cameras at the Port Authority Bus Terminal had spotted Allie....
After a few days of not hearing from her, Tony, who had been laid off from his job three weeks earlier, headed to New York. Christina stayed behind; she works in human resources for TJX Cos. in Framingham, and wanted to monitor the Facebook page....
At first, the New York City police told Tony they didn’t handle runaways.
“They said thousands of kids run away to New York, that she hadn’t been gone that long, and they had no proof she was in the city,” he recalled.
The New York television stations told him they didn’t cover runaways, either. And that’s where Tony’s connections, personal and virtual, kicked in. Friends used contacts in New York to get posters of Allie put in the security department of every library in Manhattan. A poker buddy of Tony’s knew a district manager for Starbucks, who put her poster in several of his Manhattan franchises.
Meanwhile, the Facebook page and Tony’s tweets were attracting thousands of followers and responses. A friend of his knew someone at the Huffington Post, which ran a short piece on Allie’s disappearance. E-mail chains began, with people sending the story out to all their contacts, and asking them to forward it.
When the New York Daily News picked up the story, Tony said TV reporters reconsidered it. He was interviewed on four stations, including a three-minute live interview on Nov. 16 — 12 days after Allie’s disappearance. He spoke of his upcoming birthday, and Thanksgiving, and what a gift it would be to have his daughter home.
“Some guy saw me on TV, recognized Allie, and called the New York City Police Department,” Tony said. “The tipster mentioned that this was a neighborhood where people didn’t snitch, but he did anyway.”
Within hours, police went to a Jersey City address -- the home of a 42-year-old sexual predator the teenager may have met online -- and arrested Jorge Luis Garzon, who was charged with kidnapping, child endangerment, and other offenses. He pleaded guilty and is serving a five-year sentence....
She has never spoken to her parents about the ordeal, other than to apologize to them....
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