NC - Durham traffic stop discovers runaway teens on cross-country odyssey with 2 men

I wonder if there are existing missing threads for either of the teens?

One of the runaways, a 13-year-old from Baltimore, was in a Durham courtroom earlier this week, offering details of a plot so incredible that at one point her mother tearfully blurted out: “This is like some kind of terrible movie.”

Now two men from out of state, ages 20 and 22, are being held in the Durham County jail on charges of kidnapping, possession of a stolen weapon, possession of a stolen vehicle, and, in one case, contributing to the delinquency of a juvenile. Investigators are looking into possible sex-trafficking ties.

“After 14 years as a judge, I have never seen anything like this,” said Marcia Morey, the district court judge who presided over the juvenile hearings on whether the teens should be returned to their parents.

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2013/06/06/4090802/durham-traffic-stop-discovers.html#storylink=cpy
 
I'm glad all the teens made it back home alive and I hope they learned something and got the help they needed.
 
The "teens" planned this all on their own and after they had already taken off on a road trip in a stolen car and hooked up with one another THEN they met the two young homeless guys (men) and picked them up too.

The "men" didn't plan this and according to the article they didn't steal the guns or the car etc....the teens did all of that and the men were picked up as hitchhikers.
 
The story began May 28 in Michigan. A 15-year-old boy packed two .22 rifles, a filet knife and a suitcase into his mother’s Escalade and began the first leg of a journey that would take him from Ann Arbor, Mich., to Hazelton, Pa., then to Silver Spring, Md., Baltimore and eventually Durham.

Along the way, he picked up four teenage girls who ranged in age from just barely 13 to 15. In Hazelton, Pa., a former coal town in the Pocono Mountains, Wu and Wurzel, each purporting to be homeless, joined the carload.

Wu, who came to the United States from China on a student visa, had taken a bus from New York to Pennsylvania. Wurzel, described by law enforcement officers as the mastermind of the plan, had come in from Delaware, his home state.

The group had planned to pick up two other young people, possibly in Florida or California, after they left Durham.

The teens had never met each other or the two adults. But all claimed to be familiar with each other from the Experience Project, a website at www.experienceproject.com that has the hook “Find people who understand you.”

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2013/06/06/4090802/durham-traffic-stop-discovers.html#storylink=cpy

Doesn't sound like two homeless guys that just got "sucked in" to a hairbrained scheme by a bunch of teens to me.
 
The Experience Project website has a section titled “I Wanna Run Away From Home.” “This group is for people who just want out,” the section states. “Something at home is hurting them and they just want to leave. They can’t stand it anymore and they don’t want to deal with it anymore.”

As the carload left the Durham park with its newest passenger on board, the plan was to include two others in a plot that Wurzel had detailed online.

“We can go live in our own little community and call it our Eden,” the mother of one of the girls said Wurzel wrote on The Experience Project website


Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2013/06/06/4090802/durham-traffic-stop-discovers.html#storylink=cpy
 
Sounds like how some of the communes started back in the hippie days...
 
I read the reference to sex trafficking , somehow, sadly I think that fits.thank goodness they were stopped! Imo
 
Mein Gott! Now I have a migraine.

How did Hazelton, PA fit into all this?

Prayers for anyone that has teenagers.
 

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