We hear about kids who meet strangers online and the bad things that can happen. Well one 13-year-old Pearland girl knows first hand how scary things can get when your online friends meet you face to face.
"I was really scared," the girl said.
It's been a rough week for girl, and it all started with a Facebook friendship with a 16-year-old boy.
"He was playing around with me, saying he was going to kidnap me, but I didn't think he was really going to do it," the girl said.
But within a few weeks, the flirtation turned into a face-to-face meeting when the boy arrived at the girl's school with his mother in tow.
"So I decided to go with him, and when I was there, they were treating me good and everything but I did not know what was happening," she said.
Pearland police say on Tuesday, 37-year-old Dorothy Montenegro and her son took the girl from Pearland to their home in Crosby 40 miles away. After a few hours, the girl says things went bad when her cell phone started receiving text messages from her worried parents.
"He like broke my phone kind of and stole it from me," the girl said.
Back in Pearland, the girl's parents filed a missing persons report then hit the Internet and tracked down Montenegro's address. They say that's when the cops headed to Crosby.
"We were in the back seat and his mom was in the front seat driving and the cops came up to the car and told us to get out of the car and they took me away from them," the girl said.
While she is home now, the girl says no one should follow her example.
"I would tell them not to meet guys on Facebook and to be careful who they meet," the girl said.
Good advice, according to Katherine Cabaniss with Houston's Crime Stoppers, who adds parents need to pay close attention to a child's online friendships.
"You would never think about sending your 13-year-old to the mall and saying invite anyone into our house and welcome them into our living room. You would never think about that, but when you allow a child to talk to someone on the Internet unsupervised, it is just like inviting a stranger into your living room," Cabaniss said.
The 16-year-old boy and his mom were both charged with misdemeanor counts of enticing a child.
We worked on this story with The Pearland Journal, a Houston Community Newspapers partner. You can read more about this case in The Pearland Journal.
