Projo 7 to 7 News Blog

PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- Investigators have arrested a man from Alabama who allegedly met a 15-year-old Minnesota girl and lured her into making a cross-country bus trip.

The suspect, identified only as being 26 years old, was taken into custody by officers at the Peter Pan bus station off Route 95 at 3 a.m. on Sunday as he awaited the girl's arrival. What the suspect did not know was that the girl had been intercepted in Chicago by police there.

"We're still trying to run this to ground out here," Sheriff Phil Hodapp of Minnesota's Beltrami County said on Tuesday.

"We believe the little girl came into contact with the individual through a chat room on a Web site she was visiting. Shortly after she made the initial contact they apparently exchanged cell phone numbers and then started texting each other. That led to the arrangements to get her to go out East."

Hodapp said the teenager was reported missing on Friday.

"Our officers worked to try to figure out what happened, and we were able to put it together. We worked with the family to figure out where she might be going. We found out she was on a bus headed for the bus station out there."

Hodapp said his investigators alerted police in Chicago, who contacted the girl's aunt, a resident of that city.

The aunt "helped police ID the girl when she switched buses," the sheriff said, adding that the girl's mother flew to Chicago and took her daughter home.

Hodapp said that investigators from his office continued to work with officers from Attleboro and Providence, and arranged to wait for the suspect at the bus station. The significance of the Attleboro connection was not immediately clear.

"We had some very good police work done by several agencies," Hodapp said -- "and a little bit of luck."

 Tags  Attleboro Mass. Providence RI

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