A high-functioning autistic teen who went missing from Arizona for almost four years has been reunited with her mother after turning up in Montana.
Alicia Navarro vanished from her Glendale home aged just 14, sparking a massive manhunt involving the FBI.
In July, she walked into a police station 1,000 miles away and identified herself as a missing person.
The reunion
Now the 19-year-old has been reunited with her mom Jessica Nunez, with the two planning to spend Thanksgiving and Christmas together, Fox News reports.
A representative for the family confirmed to the outlet that the teen has been given medical treatment, and said there would be ‘challenges’ ahead as she has not attended school since her disappearance.
Glendale Police Department Lt. Scott Waite said Navarro had an ’emotionally overwhelming’ reunion with her mom and was ‘very apologetic (as) to what she has put her mother through.’
The reunion brings to a close Nunez’s nightmare ordeal, which began when her daughter disappeared from the family home on September 15, 2019 just a week before her 15th birthday.
She left a note for her parents which said: ‘I ran away. I will be back, I swear. I’m sorry.’
She was not found despite efforts
Despite a multi-agency search and thousands of tip offs, she eluded authorities for more than four years.
Why she showed up
But in July she strolled into a Maricopa County police station asking to be removed from the missing persons list so she could reapply for a driving license.
Where did she hide for the past four years?
Soon after investigators ascertained that she had been living in on Montana’s Fort Belknap Reservation with her boyfriend Edmund Davis, 36.
Davis has since been charged with sexual abuse of children over material found on his cellphone which he tried to hide in a bin after police raided his Montana home.
Her mother raised concerns that Navarro, who was diagnosed as high-functioning on the autism spectrum, may have been lured away by someone she met online when she disappeared in 2019.
