Case of the missing teen

SOMETHING quite strange seems to have occurred with the reported disappearance of a 15-year-old girl from the Penal Police Station, an apparent mystery that requires some investigation. If what her anguished parents have told this newspaper is true, the treatment meted out to them by officers at the station seems insensitive and cruel, if not bordering on the criminal. How can a teenage girl simply vanish from a police station overnight without any officer knowing what had happened or, if he knows, not informing her anxious parents about it? This is the crux of the story we have been told by her parents and, from what they say, the attitude they have encountered from the police seems to exemplify a major problem of the Police Service, one that we have condemned repeatedly in the past.

According to her parents, the teenager ran away from home on Sunday August 22 together with her alleged 17-year-old boyfriend. The Holy Faith Convent student was reported missing to the Penal Police and, later the same day, an officer from the station informed her parents that she had been found and that they should come to get her. At the station, however, a worried mother met a different situation. Her daughter was there with a counsellor but no boyfriend. And after some discussion with the policemen she was told that the girl would be kept overnight at the station since she would be charged the next morning before a Siparia magistrate for running away.

But when they went to court, they did not find their daughter who failed to appear. They told Newsday that on Tuesday August 24 a police sergeant called and advised them to report the child as missing. “The police cannot account for my daughter since then. She was last in their custody,” said the father. On Thursday August 26, the matter was again called in the Second Magistrates’ Court, but again the runaway teenager was no where to be found. “Where is my child?” asks a distraught father. “I am questioning the function of the Senior Superintendent in charge of the South Western Division. I want to know, apart from where my daughter is, if these officers are capable and competent of running this division competently.” We are inclined to support the sentiments expressed by this distressed father, since we find it difficult to believe that he and his wife would deliberately concoct such an elaborate story about their missing daughter.

Yesterday, however, we were given a different explanation for the “mystery” by the Penal Police. They say the teenager phoned the station to report that she was “alive and well.” According to the officers, the girl ran away from home as a result of an alleged domestic dispute. Sometime later, the teen and her parents visited the Penal station and, after some discussion, arrangements were made for her to visit a probation officer the next day. When she did not turn up as had been pre-arranged, a missing person report was made by her father. The police, then, are contradicting the account given by the girl’s parents, since they claim that the teenager was never held at the station. Although she has called her parents to reassure them that she is safe, the girl has not yet been found. Now we are left to wonder who is really telling the truth? The parents or the police? And what is the role the “boyfriend” is playing in all of this? Let us hope that Commissioner Paul will find out soon.