The 16-year-old Jersey girl who ran away from home after tweeting about an intruder in her parents' house is likely in NYC, local police said today. Kara Alongi—who currently has over 100,000 followers on Twitter!—was spotted on a surveillance camera at a NJ Transit station buying a train ticket on Sunday night. Investigators cross-referenced the ticket machine's history against the time-stamp on the video and determined that she bought a ticket to NYC.
Police are treating the incident as a missing person’s case and not a criminal investigation, and investigators were immediately suspicious that Alongi's Twitter cry for help ("There is somone in my hour ecall 911") was spurious. There were no signs of forced entry or disturbance in her parents' Clark, NJ home, and a police dog followed her scent out the back door, through the yard, and to the sidewalk out front, where the trail went cold.
A cab driver tipped off police that he had picked up Alongi outside her house and driven her, alone, to the Rahway station. She's seen in surveillance footage at the station with a large backpack, and police say she bought a ticket to the Big Apple. "We don’t know why she would have gone, assuming, to Penn Station,” the local police chief told NJ.com. Have you seen her? Or are you too hurt by her Twitter hoax to even bother looking?
Nobody's heard from Alongi and she hasn't used social media since she Tweeted Wolf some 40 hours ago, which must be a harrowing existential nightmare for a 16-year-old girl. On the plus side, the kid now has a HUGE Klout score and Twitter will probably make her account verified soon! Which reminds us—we need to make a tweet about a scary intruder currently prowling @Gothamist's offices...
