A missing 13-year-old girl from Texas was recently found locked in a shed in North Carolina after Texas law enforcement worked with the FBI to find and rescue the young girl.
Allegedly, Jorge Ivan Santos Camacho, a 34-year-old man, was communicating with the girl on the internet and convinced her to run away from home with him. Santos allegedly picked her up in his vehicle and transported her over 1,000 miles across the country, where he ended up locking her in a shed in North Carolina.
“They discovered that the juvenile had been communicating with an adult male through social media chat platforms,” Davidson County Sheriff Richie Simmons said. “The content of the chat was consistent with grooming and enticement, and he enticed her to leave home where he picked her up in the (Dallas) area,” he added.
Fortunately, however, the police were able to find and rescue the young girl from Comancho’s clutches. Surveillance footage near the girl’s home captured Camacho’s vehicle, where they obtained his license plate. A Texas Violent Crimes Task Force special agent contacted the local North Carolina sheriff’s department in Davidson County, where the vehicle was registered. “Within 10 minutes our guys had eyes on that residence,” Capt. Stephanie Murphy told reporters. “Everything moved fairly quickly after that.”
See news footage of the pulse-pounding rescue below.
The victim’s mother told reporters that the two chatted for months on a Discord server after they met while playing an online video game. “It was very stressful and scary,” the mother said. “We were hoping to see her again and thank God that was the case. We’re going to work together, get as much help as we can and grow stronger.”
The mother warned other parents about the risks of allowing children to use the internet unsupervised, “We knew the risks, and we talked with her about them. But still this happened, it was something awful. It could have been a lot worse. It could have, and we’re lucky that it wasn’t.”
The Sheriff of Davidson county had a message for all parents, “Our message is going to be please help us out. I’m very thankful, I than God that we were able to find this young girl. It may not be that case forever and what these children must go through, they don’t think who they are talking to.”
The outbuilding/shed in which Comancho locked the girl was on the property of someone else, who let him live there because he was a friend of her son’s. Reporting on that, the New York Post said, “The property owner said she had let Camacho live in the outbuilding because he was friends with her son who lives in Texas, adding that she had no idea he had brought a girl into the shed.”
Perhaps that’s true, perhaps it isn’t. Hopefully they find out as they investigate the horrifying situation and find out what was really going on in that dark shed to the young girl, and if the property owner was at all involved.
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