A high-functioning autistic teen who went missing from Arizona for almost four years has been reunited with her mother after turning up in Montana.
Alicia Navarro vanished from her Glendale home aged just 14, sparking a massive manhunt involving the FBI.
In July, she walked into a police station 1,000 miles away and identified herself as a missing person.
Now the 19-year-old has been reunited with her mom Jessica Nunez, with the two planning to spend Thanksgiving and Christmas together, Fox News reports.
A representative for the family confirmed to the outlet that the teen has been given medical treatment, and said there would be ‘challenges’ ahead as she has not attended school since her disappearance.
Alicia Navarro has been reunited with her mom after she vanished from her Arizona home in 2019 at the age of 14
Mom Jessica Nunez and her formerly missing daughter Navarro will now spend Christmas and Thanksgiving together
Glendale Police Department Lt. Scott Waite said Navarro had an ’emotionally overwhelming’ reunion with her mom and was ‘very apologetic (as) to what she has put her mother through.’
The reunion brings to a close Nunez’s nightmare ordeal, which began when her daughter disappeared from the family home on September 15, 2019 just a week before her 15th birthday.
She left a note for her parents which said: ‘I ran away. I will be back, I swear. I’m sorry.’
Despite a multi-agency search and thousands of tip offs, she eluded authorities for more than four years.
But in July she strolled into a Maricopa County police station asking to be removed from the missing persons list so she could reapply for a driving license.
Soon after investigators ascertained that she had been living in on Montana’s Fort Belknap Reservation with her boyfriend Edmund Davis, 36.
Davis has since been charged with sexual abuse of children over material found on his cellphone which he tried to hide in a bin after police raided his Montana home.
Her mother raised concerns that Navarro, who was diagnosed as high-functioning on the autism spectrum, may have been lured away by someone she met online when she disappeared in 2019.
Alicia Navarro recently walked into a Montana police department and identified herself as a missing person
Edmund Davis, 36, is being held on a $1 million bond at Hill County Detention Center charged with two counts of child sex abuse
Investigators from the police department, FBI and US Marshals Office are now trying to determine what happened to Navarro after her disappearance. Police said Navarro told them that she hadn’t been harmed.
Over the years, Nunez partnered with various private investigative services, put up billboards, appeared on television programs and used social media in her efforts to find her daughter.
She said he daughter’s reappearance is proof ‘miracles do exist’ as she urged others not to give up hope as she announced she would be closing down the page used to appeal for information on her daughter’s whereabouts.
In statement on Facebook she said: ‘My family is complete now. I thank everyone for all the concerns and support, God is a miracle worker.’
The day before she vanished the teen asked her mom if she could stay off school.
Nunez agreed and the duo then spent a pleasant day visiting a chocolate factory.
But that night, Navarro asked her mother what time she was going to bed, and slipped out of the house when she was asleep.
I’m more than 90 percent sure that my daughter met this person online,’ she claimed at the time.
She added her daughter was a pretty cautious person, so it would have been unusual for her to be easily lured.
‘Knowing the way my daughter’s personality is, I don’t think that she would have fallen for that,’ Nunez said. ‘This person probably took a while to be able to gain [her] trust.’