Girl Is Safe After Internet-Inspired Trip to Vancouver

A 13-year-old Westminster girl was reunited with her family Friday after traveling to Vancouver to visit a 17-year-old boy she met over the Internet.

The girl disappeared Tuesday morning after her mother dropped her off at school. She apparently traveled by bus and rail the 1,101 miles up the coast to Vancouver, according to police.

Authorities found her safe at the teen’s home Thursday, just two hours after she arrived, by tracing a telephone number the girl left in her bedroom. Still, officials said the case highlights the dangers children face when meeting strangers in cyberspace.

“She’s really lucky,” said Trina Nettles, a case assistant in Tustin with National Missing and Exploited Children. “She could have been seriously hurt, sexually molested, or she could have been killed. She could have been talking to a 35-year-old balding man who is a registered sex offender.”

Added Jerry Nance, another official with the center: “Just because somebody might say they’re 13 to 15 years old, doesn’t mean that they are . . . You don’t know, and these types of incidents could have had some pretty bad outcomes because there are known pedophiles out there.”

Canadian police are still investigating the case but have made no arrests so far. The girl and her parents are scheduled to return to Westminster sometime next week.

“Now we have to go through a little bit of a healing process,” said her grandfather, who lives in Anaheim. “She was so charmed by this young man that when her parents arrived in Canada, she felt that they intruded in on this relationship. . . . This is one of the worst nightmares a parent can go through.”

Police said the girl’s family was aware of the friendship with the Canadian teenager, which helped investigators quickly determine her whereabouts.

When she disappeared, the family alerted local authorities, who searched John Wayne Airport as well as local train and bus depots. Police alerted officers at the border that the girl was missing, “but she managed to slip through,” said Constable George Kilvington of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

When police arrived at the teen’s house Thursday afternoon, he was “deceptive” about the girl’s whereabouts, Kilvington said. The officers staked out the home for several hours, finally seeing the girl through a window.

The case is one of several instances in which children and teens have been lured from their homes by people they meet on the Internet.

In 1997, a 12-year-old Palm Springs boy made a cross-country trek to Virginia to meet a 31-year-old man he met in cyberspace. In another case, a 14-year-old girl spent months on the road with a 22-year-old man she met on the World Wide Web.

Nettles and other experts said children are more likely to reach out to people on the Internet than to the adults in their lives. As a result, they can be easily preyed on.