An Amber Alert for 15-year-old girl was canceled Thursday after the Harnett County Sheriff's Office said she was located in Dare County. Family members are posting that she is safe.
Family members believed the missing Harnett County teen was in danger after someone picked her up outside their Spring Lake home on Tuesday morning.
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Thursday, more than 48 hours after the girl went missing, she was located in Dare County by state and federal agents, along with local law enforcement, according to the Harnett County Sheriff's Office.
The sheriff's office will hold a news conference at 3 p.m. to share more details. It will be livestreamed on WRAL.com.
According to the Harnett County Sheriff's Office, the girl's mother, said her daughter had been missing since Tuesday around 6:15 a.m. The mother believes her daughter was picked up outside their Spring Lake home on Storey Acres Road.
There’s no word on who might have picked her up or what the vehicle may have looked like, but a friend of the family said family members believed the girl was taken by a predator she met online.
The State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) both became involved with the search. K-9 units were used in the search, and agents went door-to-door speaking with neighbors and friends. Checkpoints were set up in the area surrounding the girl's home.
According to the Harnett County Sheriff's Office, "Both the K-9 search and the canvass of the area produced negative results. Deputies also interviewed numerous friends immediately after the mother reported the juvenile missing which did not produce any positive results."
The Emergency Alert Service phone notification did not come to most smartphones until around 1 p.m., roughly two hours after her disappearance was first known. The alert described the girl as an endangered child.
According to Morrissa Moyer with the Center for Missing Persons, which handles Amber Alerts, the delay was the result of a programming issue caused by the center recently switching to a new system.
"What we wanted to do was try to accomplish three separate processes with one process," she said. "In the future, we will be able to do these alerts very quickly, precisely and get the information out to those people who need to know."
Moyer said 15-year-old girls are especially vulnerable in cases like this.
"15-year-old females, specifically 15-year-old females who are minorities, go missing the most," Moyer said. "We don't have a real reason why that happens, but this is very much on par statistically with what happens on a state level and a national level."
If you have any information regarding this case, you're asked to call the Harnett County Sheriff's Office immediately at 910-893-9111, or call 911 or *HP.