Missing text messaging girl found safe

(Jersey City -WABC, March 9, 2006) (WABC) -- The search for the Jersey City girl text messaging her parents is over this morning. She was found in Manhattan and is being treated at a hospital in the city.

Stella and Robert Browne had received six very unsettling text messages from their daughter's cell phone.

The urgent pleas for help appeared to be coming from their daughter. The 13-year-old left home heading to school at 8:00 a.m. Monday.

Robert says she walked in a direction she normally doesn't take and despite school records indicating she arrived at P.S. 34, he says she never did.

Robert Browne, Father: "Her friends said she didn't show up. They didn't see her come to school, but they signed her in."

Then about three hours later Stella got the first message: "Someone was following me and I just don't remember what happened. I just woke up in a basement. It's pitch black."

Hours passed before the second message: "He's making me do disgusting stuff I don't want to do."

Ten minutes later came another message: "He and he is telling me they will hurt me if I don't listen to them."

Just before 9:00 Monday night the exhausted couple got the final message: "They're taking me to New York."

Police also say that on Monday several of the girl's friends also received text messages but at this point if you call her cell phone it goes straight to voice mail.

More on the investigation in Eyewitness News at Noon.

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