Teen Sneaks to Mideast for MySpace Rendezvous

A 16-year-old honor student from Michigan lied to persuade her parents to get her a passport and then flew to the Middle East to be with a West Bank man she met on MySpace.com, authorities say.

U.S. officials in Jordan persuaded her to turn around and go home before she reached the West Bank.

She returned home Friday.

Katherine Lester is a straight-A student and student council member, according to her father, Terry.

“She’s a good girl,” Terry Lester said. MySpace.com is a social networking website with more than 72 million members who can post items including photos and blogs. There have been scattered accounts of pedophile predators trolling the site.

Katherine disappeared Monday after talking her family into getting her a passport by saying she was going to Canada with friends, sheriff’s officials said.

She apparently planned to visit a man whose MySpace account describes him as a 25-year-old from Jericho, Undersheriff James Jashinske said.

The FBI traced the teenager to a Wednesday flight from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport to Tel Aviv. At a scheduled stop in Amman, Jordan, U.S. officials persuaded her to return home, FBI agent Robert Beeckman said.

Television news footage showed Katherine waving as she walked across a tarmac at Bishop International Airport in Flint late Friday. She was taken to a private area to be reunited with her family.

Katherine apparently contacted the man from Jericho about three months ago, Jashinske said.

Jericho is a relatively calm area of the West Bank.

MySpace forbids youngsters 13 and under from joining, and the profiles of 14- and 15-year-olds are restricted to people the teens have listed as friends.

Older users have the option of restricting certain personal data to access by people they have identified as friends.

Shawn Lester told the Saginaw News her daughter had “never given me a day’s trouble.... I just don’t understand with all these new laws protecting America how a 16-year-old kid could get out of the country.”

She said her daughter had never had a boyfriend.

Katherine and her mother live in Gilford, about 80 miles northwest of Detroit.