Alicia Navarro was heard yelling ‘I will go back’ to the man she was living with a day before handing herself in to police, a neighbour has alleged.
The 18-year-old went missing from Arizona in the US in 2019 when she was just 14, after leaving a note to her family saying she’d run away.
A little over a week ago, on July 23, she walked into a police station in Havre, Colarado, 1,000 miles from where she disappeared, and told officers she’d like to be taken off the missing person’s list so she could get a drivers’ licence.
She explained she wanted to live a normal life.
A neighbour of Alicia, Garret Smith, 22, said he heard her shouting at an unidentified man the day before.
He told the New York Post: ‘I was here the other day and I heard them yelling. She did say, “I will go back.” But that’s all I heard. It was the day before she turned herself in.’
It’s not currently clear exactly how long Alicia had been living at the apartment but Garret believes she and a man in his 20s have been there for around a year.
He said he spoke to Alicia for the first time a few days before hearing her shout at the man, when she claimed she was looking for her uncle.
‘She was asking for directions. She looked scared,’ he said.
She told him she was walking with her uncle and had got lost, adding she called him ‘mister’ which he found strange as he didn’t think he was much older than her.
Garret’s girlfriend, Megan Alexander, 23, said the couple watched Alicia go into a ‘random’ house and assumed she’d found someone who could help her.
Garret added that although he’d not spoken to her before, he’d seen the pair walking around and thought he noticed them holding hands once.
He described them as very shy, closed-off people.
Garret said he had spoken to the man once, but he started avoiding him after he found out he was originally from Arizona, the same state Alicia vanished from.
On Friday, police revealed a man had been detained and questioned in connection with Alicia’s mysterious case, but it’s not clear if this is the same man she shared the flat with.
Alicia ran away from her family home a few days before her 15th birthday, and left a note that said: ‘I ran away. I will be back. I swear. I’m sorry.’
She took her mobile phone, laptop, cosmetics, body spray and a comic book.Search efforts by the FBI and Center for Missing and Exploited Children were later suspended, and it became a cold case.
Since reappearing Alicia has told police she was not held against her will or hurt, and officers have said she won’t face any criminal charges. They are still considering her to be a victim.
The Navarro family’s private investigators, meanwhile, said she spoke briefly to her mother and it wasn’t yet known whether she’d be returning to her family.
Alicia is high functioning autistic, according to her mother, who believes her daughter may have been groomed and lured by a predator she met online.
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