Girl Lured From Home by E-Mail Is Found in L.A.

A 13-year-old Kentucky girl, apparently lured away from home by an electronic computer message nearly two weeks ago, was taken into protective custody in Los Angeles on Sunday after she contacted authorities.

Tara J. Noble called the local FBI office shortly after 8 a.m., a spokesman said, and agents notified Los Angeles police, who picked the girl up at a phone booth on Hollywood Boulevard about half an hour later.

“She’s OK,” Tara’s mother, Lisa Noble, said in a telephone interview from St. Matthews, Ky., a Louisville suburb. “She’s tired, hungry and wants to come home.”

The girl’s photo had been included in a front-page story in The Times on Sunday, describing the disappearance of several teen-agers who were avid participants in computer bulletin boards. Tara phoned her mother about the same time that she called authorities.

Lisa Noble said her daughter told her: “I want to come home, Mommy.”

The disappearance of Tara and other children has focused attention on the dangers lurking in cyberspace for children with access to computer chat services and e-mail where they can receive sexually explicit messages.

Tara left home after corresponding via computer with someone identified only as George from San Francisco, who told her: “We can run around our room naked all day and all night.”

Authorities were still piecing together the details of her 13 days away from home.

The girl was found a week after a 15-year-old Washington boy, Daniel Montgomery, was discovered at San Francisco International Airport after apparently responding to an invitation from a man, known as Damien, he met by e-mail.

Law enforcement officials, long concerned about material that children have access to on the computer Internet, say they now worry that children could be lured into illicit sex or pornography via on-line computer services.

“This case demonstrates the need for parents to provide oversight and guidance to their children in the use of computers and to ensure that they are being used properly,” the FBI said in a statement released in Louisville, Ky.

An America Online spokeswoman said the company offers a service that parents can use to block out children’s access to the kind of “chat rooms” where Daniel Montgomery met his contact, “Damien Starr.”

In Tara’s case, St. Matthews Police Chief Norm Mayer said the girl’s mother contacted his department as soon as she realized that she was missing. Until his investigators learned of Tara’s computer interests, Mayer said, her disappearance seemed to be a routine missing-person case.

“Then we knew it would be a little more complicated,” he said.

Once he realized that Tara had been corresponding with several people and that many of the e-mail messages were sexually explicit, Mayer said, he contacted the FBI and the Secret Service.

In the Daniel Montgomery case, his computer contact sent the youth bus fare to San Francisco. But authorities did not say how Tara paid for her trip west.

St. Matthews police believe that the girl flew from Kentucky to Birmingham, Ala., where she may have met one of her computer correspondents and spent the night.

From Birmingham, Mayer said, she took a Greyhound bus to California.

On the bus, police said, Tara struck up a friendship with another young girl who was traveling with her grandmother.

But at a stopover in Odessa, Tex., Tara made a phone call and never returned to the bus. That’s where police lost her, Mayer said.

The other girl’s grandmother later heard media reports about the missing child, recognized Tara’s name and picture and called police.

Mayer said it is still unclear who aided the girl and what eventually encouraged her to turn herself in. But when she called her mother Sunday, the girl was scared and lonely, Mayer said.

“I think she got in over her head,” Mayer said. “When she saw what was really happening, she decided to call the FBI.”

The girl was being held at Los Padrinos Child Detention Center in Downey, said Los Angeles FBI spokesman John Hoos. Agents are continuing their investigation to see if any federal statutes have been violated, he said.

Tara’s disappearance attracted national media coverage--including the front-page article in Sunday’s Times--and Hoos said it is “obvious the media coverage helped in her coming forward.”

The girl’s parents were planning to fly to Los Angeles on Sunday evening for a reunion with their daughter.

“It is a wonderful day,” Lisa Noble said as she prepared to go to the Louisville airport with her ex-husband, Sam Noble, Tara’s father. “I’m going crazy.”

Times staff writer Henry Weinstein contributed to this story.