Pandora’s Blog

This story came out late last week. Basically, a 12-year-old girl from Brookline (a suburb in Boston) met a 16-year-old girl on MySpace. They met on a talent page and the 16-year-old, who lived in LA, told the 12-year-old she would help her start a career. The 12-year-old was stopped at Logan airport in Boston, getting out of a cab. It was the quick thinking of a friend that tipped off parents and authorities.

Now, it turns out that it actually was a 16-year-old girl on the other end and not a predator. That is a rare thing. But still, who the hell is this 16-year-old think she is? Ari Goldstein? And how dumb do you have to be to do what the 12-year-old did?

How clueless do you have to be to be the parents of the 12-year-old? Not very, actually. Sadly, this is a typical case with most parents today – they just have no clue what their kids are really doing online. If the parents were monitoring internet activity of their child with computer monitoring software like our PC Pandora, this wouldn’t have happened. Thankfully it was stopped before it turned into a full fledged runaway situation.

Oh, how did the girl buy the plane ticket you ask? She used Granny’s credit card.

Here is a story from right after the incident and then another one after it was learned that the friend was responsible for blowing the whistle on the mindless 12-year-old.

Staties stop teen’s MySpace-fueled runaway attempt
By Richard Weir, The Boston Herald

State troopers intercepted a 12-year-old Brookline runaway as she got out of her cab at Logan International Airport yesterday, ticket in hand, and headed for Hollywood – lured by a possible sexual predator she met online.

“She had a dream of becoming a movie star,” said Brookline Police Capt. John O’Leary.

O’Leary said the girl’s encounter with someone claiming to be a 16-year-old girl in Los Angeles began on the MySpace talent page, and online chats led to frequent text messaging. Police are now investigating whether the person in California was a sexual predator posing as a teenage girl.

“The 16-year-old offered to help get her into shows,” O’Leary said, adding that the LA teen claimed she was friendly with teen heartthrob and movie star Dylan Thomas Sprouse and promised to introduce her to him.

“She wanted to become an actress. That’s why she was going to LA,” O’Leary said.

The unsuspecting Brookline girl’s California dreaming was initially undone by a farewell text message to two school chums, tapped out on the cab ride to Logan’s Terminal B after she left school yesterday.

A schoolmate contacted authorities, who alerted Brookline police about 9:30 a.m.

Brookline cops called the staties at Logan, telling them to watch for the missing girl, who was expected to board a late-morning American Airlines flight.

According to a police source, the girl snuck her grandmother’s credit card to buy the ticket. Brookline police tracked down the girl’s mother and rushed her to the state police barracks at the airport.

Meanwhile, troopers Timothy Harris, Glen Yianacopoulis, Steven Walker and William Yee scoured Terminal B in search of the runaway girl.

The troopers, who were given a visual description of the 12-year-old, spotted her as the cab pulled into the lower level of Terminal B at 10:10 a.m., State Police spokesman David Procopio said.

“The troopers observed a child getting out of a cab by herself at the terminal and realized that this was probably the girl they were looking for,” Procopio said. “They confronted her and she was brought back to the barracks and safely reunited with her mom.”

It was unclear whether she had bought a one-way or a round-trip ticket.

O’Leary warned parents not to let children use the Internet unsupervised or in their rooms alone, and to make them aware of the potential for predators and people misrepresenting themselves.

Chums ‘key’ to thwarting runaway try
By Richard Weir, The Boston Herald

The quick-thinking classmate of a 13-year-old Brookline runaway tipped off their teacher as the girl was en route to Logan International Airport for a flight to Los Angeles, fearing her friend would vanish and never realize her Hollywood dreams.

“I thought she would leave and we’d never see her again,” the girl, also 13, told the Herald yesterday. “ We didn’t want her to disappear.”

“They did a great job. They were key,” Brookline Police Capt. John O’Leary said of the friend and another classmate, who alerted a teacher after getting a cell phone text message from the would-be runaway saying she was off to the City of Angels.

The seventh-grade friend, who asked not to be identified, said the girl had told her pals she had been chatting online and texting with a 16-year-old pen pal named “Gabby” who lived in Los Angeles and put her in touch with someone claiming to be teen actor Dylan Thomas Sprouse.

While the runaway had told her school chums she planned to head to Hollywood to audition for “New Moon,” the sequel to the blockbuster teen vampire flick “Twilight,” they didn’t take her seriously – until Wednesday’s text message.

The friend said she was stunned to learn from a text message that her pal was in a cab, fleeing to Hollywood. Just a week earlier, a Brookline cop spoke to their class about Internet safety and online predators.

“It’s almost like she forgot everything about this,” she said, noting that the officer used a fictitious scenario of a teen named Zach “who ends up going to California and getting kidnapped” by a person he met in a chatroom.

Police said no charges would be filed against the girl for using her grandmother’s credit card to buy a one-way ticket. But they confirmed that the California contact was a 16-year-old girl, not a sexual predator.

O’Leary said the runaway girl was put in touch with the 16-year-old through a friend who met the older girl at a summer camp. He said her trip also was fueled by a broken home.

“She was very upset with her situation at home. We do have them in counseling now,” O’Leary said of the girl, who lived with her single mom and a sister.

Massport spokesman Phil Orlandella said it should be extremely difficult for a minor without an adult escort or ID to get through the TSA checkpoint, but he could not rule it out. “She’s a minor, with a one-way ticket and no bags. That rings a bell,” he said.

But O’Leary said the girl told police she “got past security, and they did question her, but she had a ticket and they allowed” her to go to the boarding area. “She got second thoughts and texted her parents. The mother asked her, ‘Can we talk before you go? Can we talk this over?’ The mother said, ‘I will meet you outside the terminal.’ ”

That’s where state trooper Glenn Yianacopolus spotted the 5-foot-tall girl in purple pajama bottoms and a jacket. The runaway’s friend said the girl’s mom sent her a text thanking her for telling the teacher of her daughter’s plan. “Luckily, she’s back and she’s safe and hopefully she won’t do anything like this again,” the friend said.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 23rd, 2009 at 3:30 PM and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.