13-year-old girl allegedly kidnapped, assaulted by man she met on MySpace
By Melissa Evans Staff Writer
Posted: 03/08/2010 03:17:23 PM PST
A 35-year-old man who met a middle school girl on a social networking site is suspected of sexually assaulting the teen at his San Pedro home, police and sources said Monday.
Samuel Francisco was arrested Friday night at his home in the 500 block of East 36th Street, where police found a distraught 13-year-old girl who had been reported missing the day before, said Los Angeles police Lt. Andrea Grossman.
Francisco was booked on suspicion of kidnapping, but more charges were expected to be sought later, police said.
Grossman said the two became acquainted on the social networking site MySpace.
The girl was leaving school Thursday when Francisco persuaded her to get into his car, police said. Investigators did not identify the school, but sources said the 13-year-old attends Wilmington Middle School.
The girl was discovered missing at 1:45 p.m. that day when her mother went to pick her up from campus, according to police.
The girl's mother searched for her daughter on her own for several hours before filing a missing person's report at the Harbor Division police station, Grossman said.
After detectives learned the victim had used social networking sites on the Internet, the case was referred to the LAPD's Internet Crimes Against Children Unit, with assistance from the Secret Service and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, both federal agencies.
Investigators with special training in Internet crime tracked the girl's MySpace page to Francisco, who had numerous pictures of young women on his page, according to reports. The suspect's page had been shut down as of Monday afternoon.
"MySpace was extremely cooperative with us," Grossman said. "We were able to locate the suspect very quickly."
The girl's mother had reportedly received a text message from her daughter on Thursday saying that she would be out of school early that day, but she never showed up, officials said.
The girl was in class at Wilmington Middle School through the end of the school day on Thursday, and did not show up for class Friday, a Los Angeles Unified School District spokesperson said.
Due to the nature of the crime, the district does not believe there was a safety threat to other students.
The popularity of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook have posed an added risk to young children, Grossman said.
"Parents don't realize that when they put their children alone with computers, they put their children alone with strangers," she said. "They don't realize how dangerous the Internet is."
A 2005 study by the National Center on Missing and Exploited Children showed that one in seven youth - about 13 percent - have been threatened by sexual predators.
Francisco is being held on $500,000 bail, and is expected to be arraigned today in Long Beach Superior Court.
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