Runaway in E-Mail Case Is Reunited With Her Parents

Two weeks after she embarked on a cross-country journey, apparently prompted by an electronic computer message, 13-year-old Tara J. Noble was reunited with her family early Monday as federal investigators sought to determine how she was lured from her home in Kentucky.

The Los Padrinos Child Detention Center in Downey released the girl to her parents at 1 a.m. Monday, less than 24 hours after she had contacted the Los Angeles FBI office and had been taken into protective custody by police. Local FBI agents interviewed her later in the day.

The girl disappeared from her home in St. Matthews, Ky., a Louisville suburb, after corresponding via electronic mail with someone identified as George in San Francisco.

In printouts of messages sent to the girl, her parents found one from George that suggested, “We can run around our room naked all day and night.” Local police investigators found several sexually explicit e-mail messages and contacted the FBI and the U.S. Secret Service.

On Monday, Tara warned other computer-savvy youngsters about the dangers of cyberspace as she and her parents prepared to return home.

“It’s not what you think,” she said, speaking to reporters before boarding a plane at Los Angeles International Airport. She said on-line prowlers “just want one thing. They want you.”

Federal investigators in Kentucky probably will question the girl today or Wednesday as they probe whether Tara’s disappearance involved violations of federal law, a spokesman for the FBI’s Louisville office said. FBI agents have interviewed people “whom she communicated with via her home computer,” the agency said in a statement released in Louisville.

Tara’s case and those of other children apparently lured from home by electronic mail have focused the attention of law enforcement officials on the nebulous web of chat rooms, bulletin boards and other electronic communications, and the potential that youngsters may be drawn into illicit sex or pornography.

The girl’s case drew national media coverage, including a front-page Times story on the day that Los Angeles police located Tara at a phone booth on Hollywood Boulevard.

St. Matthews police investigators trying to retrace Tara’s steps during her 13 days as a missing person believe that she flew from Kentucky to Birmingham, Ala., where she may have spent the night. She boarded a Greyhound bus bound for California but left the bus in Odessa, Tex., to make a phone call--the last record of her whereabouts--and did not return. The grandmother of a girl Tara befriended on the bus called police after hearing media reports about her disappearance.

Tara resurfaced a week after a 15-year-old Washington boy, Daniel Montgomery, was found at San Francisco International Airport after apparently responding to a message sent by a man, identified on-line as Damien Starr, he met via e-mail.