A missing 13-year-old from Dallas was found on Friday locked in a shed 1,000 miles from her home after being abducted and then raped by a man she met on a social media platform, authorities said.
Police found the teen in Lexington, North Carolina, in a locked outbuilding on the property, Davidson County Sheriff Richie Simmons said in a news conference on Monday.
Jorge Ivan Santos Camacho, 34, was arrested on charges of abduction, human trafficking and statutory rape, with other charges still pending, police said. He is currently being held in the Davidson County Detention Center on a $1.25 million bond, jail records show.
On Friday at 6 p.m., the sheriff’s office in Davidson County got a call from the Greensboro FBI, to let them know a teen had disappeared from her home in Dallas, Texas. She had been chatting with a man she met on a social media platform, Texas authorities told their counterparts in North Carolina, and surveillance video showed a car by the teen’s home that was registered to an address in North Carolina.
Investigators surveilled the property in North Carolina, and pulled over a car leaving the property during a routine traffic stop, said police. After speaking with the driver, investigators were able to determine that the teen was being kept in a building on the property, authorities said.
Others who lived on the property told WFAA, a Dallas television station, that Camacho lived in the shed and that was “his room.”
The teen’s mother told WFAA that her daughter had been missing since March 1. “We are so happy to see her again and thank God that is the case,” the mother told WFAA. She said she knew her daughter was a gamer and had checked her Discord account, a chat platform geared toward gamers.
The sheriff said the department’s caseload involving minors and social media platforms has skyrocketed since 2021. “We are taxed to the max and can’t go any further,” he said. The sheriff said in the news conference the county has seen eight cases since February 2021. Davidson County is home to roughly 170,000 people.
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