A FLORIDA TEEN staged her own abduction, costing the state thousands of dollars to search for her – all to win back her ex-boyfriend.
Ankita Lavender (16) called her father just after 7pm on Tuesday night, telling him she had been abducted by two men in a pickup truck.
News4Jax.com reports that her parents called 911 immediately:
Mother: Her father is talking to her right now, and she says she was kidnapped by two guys in a white truck.
911: Is she still talking to you on the cellphone?
Father: They just stopped somewhere and they got out, she said they got out and then…she’s telling them to stop and her phone is turned off.
An Amber Alert was issued and over the next few hours 40 officers and a police helicopter searched for her.
At around 10.25pm, a driver spotted her lying at the side of the road, less than a mile from where she claimed to have been abducted.
Police say she was distressed and told them she had been thrown from the truck, but they could not see any visible injuries.
After further questioning from detectives, she admitted she had made the whole thing up – as a way of playing “the sympathy card” to win back her ex-boyfriend.
Tweets from her now-deleted Twitter account show she talked often about “disappearing”.
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Lavender could face charges of filing a false police report for her scheming.
Colonel Craig Aldrich of the Clay County Sheriff’s Office estimated that the search cost from $5,000 to $6000.
He believe Lavender should pay for her actions, telling Action News Jacksonville:
My personal opinion is that she should be charged, but that’s a matter for the state attorney’s office.
We’ve had too many instances in Florida of abductions and people are in tune to that. We don’t want to get into the situation where we appear to be crying wolf but that’s why this is so severe and almost ridiculous.
