After over three years of being missing, Alicia Navarro turned up at a Montana police station, the Glendale, Arizona police department announced in a video statement posted to their Facebook page.
Navarro, who is now 18, went missing when she was just 14 years old. According to a missing persons poster shown in an NBC report on the matter, at the time she went missing, she was just four feet nine inches tall and 89 pounds.
“Alicia Navarro has been located,” Jose Santiago of the Glendale Police Department said in a statement. “She is, by all accounts, safe. She is, by all accounts, healthy. And she is, by all accounts, happy.”
The young woman expressed her appreciation for the police in a video released by the police department.
“Did anybody hurt you in any way?” a police interviewer asked her in the video.
“No, no one hurt me…Thank you. Thank you for offering help to me,” Navarro responded.
A lot is still unknown about Navarro’s activities while she was missing. At the time of her disappearance, she left a note behind that read, “I ran away. I will be back, I swear. I’m sorry. – Alicia.”
Investigators will continue to look into the details of Navarro’s disappearance
Nevertheless, investigators believe there is more to the story.
Although, as Lt. Scott Waite of the Glendale Police Department notes, it began as a runaway situation, “there are, of course, more dynamics at play as you start to put together the puzzle.”
Additionally, police do not yet know how Navarro came to be in Montana. Additionally, there may be non-normative mental health conditions to be considered.
According to the NBC report, Navarro’s mother said that Alicia was on the autism spectrum.
“To us she is a victim,” Waite said. “And we need to provide services to her, whether that be mental, or just health-wise, or just helping her get her life back in order.”
Navarro’s mother, in a video published by NBC, expressed her relief at the news of her daughter’s safety.
“I don’t have details, but the important thing is that she is alive,” Navarro’s mother said. Still, police have stated there is yet a lot of work to be done on the case.
“As much as we’d like to say this is the end,” said Waite, “we know this is probably only the beginning of where this investigation will go and that we will continue to work with our state, local, federal partners, and even across state lines to make sure that Alicia has everything that she needs.”
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