The FBI has joined the search for a 15-year-old girl who disappeared without a trace from her South Carolina bedroom.
Gabrielle Swainson vanished without her purse and identification on Aug. 19, and there was no sign of forced entry at her Richland County, S.C., home.
The teen’s cell phone was missing, but since her disappearance, there has been no activity on it.
“I don’t know what has happened. I don’t know how it happened, and this is really a nightmare,” mother Elvia Swainson told ABC News. “It’s the worst situation a parent could be in.”
Her mother said Gabrielle had never tried to run away and had no reason to do so. The teen had just made the junior varsity cheerleading squad at her high school.
“It’s a very sad thing, and we are just praying she is found very soon,” school spokeswoman Theresa Riley told the Charlotte Observer.
Swainson went missing between 3 a.m. and 7 a.m while her mother was at work.
Elvia Swainson said it was the first time she had left her daughter alone during her overnight shift.
She was alerted to Gabrielle’s disappearance by a buzzing clock alarm. When she went to turn it off, she discovered her daughter was gone.
‘”Her purse was still there with her charger for her phone in it and all the ingredients of her purse, like her wallet and her credit card, everything is still there,” a private investigator hired by the family said.
We’re going to work this like it’s something bad, in hopes that it turns out to be something good,” Sheriff Leon Lott told the Charlotte Observer.
via BMS
