Missing girl, 11, found safe after leaving North Highlands home overnight on foot
After a large-scale search Friday, deputies in Sacramento County found a missing 11-year-old girl who reportedly walked away from her North Highlands home overnight and stayed at a school friend’s home without telling her mother.
The girl was barefoot when she walked away from her home on Jion Court about 1:20 a.m. after an argument with her mother, said Sgt. Kionna Rowe, a Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman. The mother called the Sheriff’s Office to report her missing about a half-hour later.
There was no reason to suspect anything “nefarious” or “suspicious” was involved in the girl’s disappearance, Rowe said. The Sheriff’s Office has a policy to use all available resources to search for a missing child 12 years old or younger. Rowe said her age pushed authorities to do whatever they could to find her.
The Sheriff’s Office on social media released a description of the missing girl and gathered personnel at a staging area Friday morning at Trinity Life Center, which is near McClellan Park. A sheriff’s helicopter also was used to search for the girl from above.
About 10:15 a.m., authorities were still searching for the girl. Rowe said sheriff’s personnel had already done two grid-searches in the area, and they were about to launch another search using trailing dogs.
The sheriff’s spokeswoman said the dog teams, brought in from the Bay Area, would try to track her scent after sniffing an article of her clothing.
At the same time, investigators were reaching out to her friends to see if she might be at one of their homes.
“I just feel good that we’re going to find her soon,” Rowe said at that time.
By 11 a.m., investigators had found the girl. She was safe and had been staying at a school friend’s home, said sheriff’s spokesman Sgt. Rodney Grassmann.
This story was originally published April 16, 2021 at 8:17 AM.
