Five days after going missing, a 12-year-old Brooklyn girl who had purportedly run away from home and was lost in Manhattan has been discovered safe.
After Victorious “Tori” Perozo did not return home from her Queens school on April 9, authorities announced in an update that she was reunited with her family on Sunday.
When Tori’s preteen daughter, Eliana Perozo, found an AirTag linked to her keys and realized she was going to Manhattan rather than Prospect Lefferts Gardens after her studies at The Baccalaureate School for Global Education, she reported her sister missing.
Due to their mother’s absence from their life, Perozo, who is her sister’s legal guardian, had stated that she last saw her younger sister leaving for school at roughly 6:50 a.m.
The previous evening, the preteen had run afoul of her.
“I think she’s a 12-year-old who survived a lot of loss and there’s so much support and mental health services and people that love her and support her — but I feel that’s not the case in her 12-year-old mind so she ran away,” Perozo stated.
After witnessing Tori texting an older male, the elder sibling claimed to have taken away her smartphone and replaced it with a flip phone.
However, Perozo noticed that Tori was not picking up the phone and that the AirTag was heading away from their house.
“When school let out, I was watching her on her AirTag. I can see her get on the correct train from school … then I saw her go into the city and then once she hit the city I saw her AirTag go up towards the Bronx instead of down towards Brooklyn,” the worried sister stated.
“That’s when I knew that she was at least going somewhere she wasn’t supposed to be going.”
Perozo, along with a buddy, located the AirTag and followed it to a Bronx apartment complex. When a guy responded, he claimed to have picked up the Apple gadget off the ground around 134th Street and St. Anne’s Avenue, where it had last sent out a signal.
When he discovered the AirTag, he said he had never seen Tori. Later, cops said Perozo, they saw the girl on security footage in the East Village early on Thursday morning. It seemed like she was boarding the N/R line at the NYU-8th St. subway stop at approximately 5:45 a.m.
“A lot of people are working hard to find her and she’s really loved and I don’t want this moment to be a defining moment in her life. She’s a really great kid,” Perozo previously stated.
