"Man captured with missing Fla. teen" Associated Press June 20, 2014
NEW ORLEANS — A truck stop cashier spotted a sex offender and a Florida teen who’d been missing for a week, setting off a 40-mile chase across Louisiana swampland that ended when a tire on the man’s stolen truck burst into flames, officials said Thursday.
The man got out of the truck — taken from the Florida Panhandle — with a knife, and officers subdued him with a stun gun and a police dog, said Corporal Paul Mouton of the Lafayette Police Department. Officers then got the girl out of the truck.
Steven Myers, 41, of Plant City, Fla., and the girl both were in serious but stable condition from knife wounds, officials said. Investigators believe but have not confirmed that Myers stabbed the girl and then himself, said Mouton.
‘‘To hear that your daughter, your baby, has been stabbed. . . . I wouldn’t wish that on anyone,’’ the girl’s father said at a news conference in Tampa, near their home in Valrico. The Associated Press is not identifying the girl because of allegations she was sexually assaulted.
The teen had been missing since June 11. She wasn’t kidnapped, but Myers manipulated her, Hillsborough sheriff’s Colonel Donna Lusczynski said.
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Sorry, readers. I went right by it.
