A missing teenager left a note telling her mother ‘this will be the last time you’ll hear from me for a very long time’, then vanished.
Geneva Hodge, 17, ran away from her home in Bellville, Texas, sometime on Wednesday morning and left the handwritten note on her pillow.
Her mother, Frances Schrader, discovered the note that morning and has not heard from Geneva since, and fears she has been kidnapped.
‘I am completely heartbroken. The day she went missing I couldn’t breathe. It felt like my heart was ripped out of my chest. I miss my baby so much,’ she said.
Geneva Hodge, 17, ran away from her home in Bellville, Texas, sometime on Wednesday morning and left the note on her pillow
Geneva with her older brothers, who are both in the military. Her family said she planned to join the air force after finishing high school
Schrader shared the note with DailyMail.com and said it sounded nothing like her daughter, who was excited for her senior year of school.
‘Dear mom, I love you a lot and I know me leaving is going to kill you. I’m alright! It was nobody’s decision but my own,’ it read.
‘I’m going to do online schooling and finish everything. I’m with some people that I trust very much.
‘I’m always gonna be your little girl. I’ve grown up and became this amazing young lady. Just remember mom, I love you so much!!
‘This is goodbye for a long time! I’m sorry. Bye mom, I love you! Love, Geneva.’
Schrader said the note contained spelling mistakes despite her being a good student, meaning it was written in a hurry.
‘It’s not my daughter. She just got color guard captain for her senior year, she made As and Bs at school even with her learning disability,’ she said.
‘It may have been her handwriting on the note, but the words were not her…. There’s something wrong with what’s going on.’
Her mother, Frances Schrader, discovered the note that morning and has not heard from Geneva since, and fears she has been kidnapped
Schrader discovered the note that morning and has not heard from her since, and fears she has been kidnapped
Schrader said her daughter was a ‘good kid’ who had never done anything like this before, and she has a bad feeling about what happened to her.
Schrader said Geneva factory reset her phone, took the SIM card out, put it in a different phone case and hid it in a drawer with other old phones.
Geneva had bought a new phone case from Five Below during a recent girls shopping trip with her brother’s fiancée.
Geneva also left without any clothes, medicine, her asthma puffer, or even a toothbrush, and her debit card hadn’t been used since she disappeared.
‘She has poison ivy real bad, she’s highly allergic to it, and she didn’t even take any medicine for that with her,’ he mother said.
‘Geneva always likes her hair and makeup done but she didn’t take any of that.’
Schrader said she was so sick with worry that she had barely eaten or slept since Geneva disappeared, which along with her diabetes meant she lost 10lbs in just a few days.
Schrader told DailyMail.com the teenager was spotted with an older man about 26 miles away in Brookshire, Texas, about 8 to 8.30am on Wednesday.
‘I’m so scared she’s been kidnapped. I think he talked her into leaving with him,’ she said.
Schrader explained that the owner of D’Lux Donuts on the corner of Bains and S Front streets said the man arrived with Geneva in a white Honda Civic.
He was aged 30 to 40, about 5ft, 10in to 6ft tall, skinny and ‘dirty looking’ with glasses, said the witness, who initially though he was her father.
Geneva was a model student and going to be captain of her school’s color guard next year
Geneva is an A student despite having a learning disability
Geneva with her mother and stepfather at her brothers’ graduation
Schrader said the man was ‘rubbing her back and touching her bottom and she looked uncomfortable’.
‘She was just standing there still and wouldn’t move, like something was really wrong,’ she said the witness recalled.
The man also had a work name badge on but it was turned around so you couldn’t see the name
Police are still confirming the girl was Geneva, but the witness identified the missing teenager from a photograph, Schrader said.
Schrader said Geneva showed a photo of the man to a colleague at her local Brookshire Brothers, where she has worked for two years, four or five days before she disappeared.
‘She said he “looked like he was on drugs” and told my daughter “that man don’t look right”,’ she said.
‘Geneva said he was 21 and has says he’s going to take care of her.’
Schrader said the colleague gave her a detailed description of the man in the photo that matched the one given by the donut shop owner.
The man was laying in bed wearing a wife-beater and oval square prescription glasses with a metal frame.
He had brunette or dirty-blonde short curly hair, a moustache and a patchy beard and a scruffy face, a skinny nose, and a square chin.
His name started with an E, but she couldn’t remember exactly what it was.
Geneva factory reset her phone, took the SIM card out, put it in a different phone case and hid it in a drawer with other old phones
Geneva went to work as normal on Tuesday and was seen speaking to a teenage boy in his truck on her lunch break.
Schrader said the pair were just friends and police had interviewed the young man and cleared him of any involvement in Geneva’s disappearance.
Her mother picked her up from work and the family went to bed about 10.30pm, before which it seemed like nothing was wrong.
‘She was happy, she was smiling, she ate supper, she was showing us the poison ivy that was all over her,’ she said.
Schrader and her husband, Kelly, got up early for work the next morning and she let Geneva sleep as she didn’t have work or school that day.
She said Geneva must have left even before Kelly got up about 5.45am as her chihuahua named Baby sleeps in her room with the door shut all night – but was on the couch instead.
Schrader went home for lunch about 11am and discovered Geneva’s note when she went into her room to check on her.
Geneva left without any clothes, medicine, her asthma puffer, or even a toothbrush, and her debit card hadn’t been used since she disappeared
Geneva showed a photo of the man to a colleague at her local Brookshire Brothers, where she has worked for two years, four or five days before she disappeared
Her mother believes the man told her what to write in the note, and how to reset and hide her phone to remove trace of their messages.
‘My daughter couldn’t even set up a phone, somebody told her how to do this,’ she said.
She said Geneva had to have met him down the road because their other dogs went crazy whenever someone is out the front.
Schrader said she was concerned the man would get her daughter hooked on drugs after hearing he looked substance-addled in the photo.
She said a truck stop in Brookshire is a notorious human trafficking location and friends were staking it out every night.
‘I’m hoping she’s still in Brookshire and they can find her before they leave town,’ she said.
‘Austin County is driving me crazy because they keep saying we don’t have any information and they won’t put out an Amber Alert because she left on her own and she’s 17 – but that shouldn’t matter.’
Schrader made an emotional appeal in a Facebook post for her daughter to come home.
‘I’m so worried about her. I love my girl. Everyone is worried about you Geneva. Please call momma. I will come and get you,’ she wrote.
‘I miss you and I love you very much. You’re my baby girl and I want you to come home.
Geneva (center) with her stepfather Kelly, mother Frances, and two brothers
‘Both Kelly and I have cried and been staying up outside waiting for you. Kelly stays in chair in living room every night so when you come home. ‘Your brothers are worried about you. Calling and texting every hour to see if we’ve heard anything yet.
‘They hate they can’t come home to help look for you. But they love you and want you to come home.’
Shrader said the family was supposed to float on the river for Father’s Day and revealed about their close mother-daughter bond.
She is such a beautiful girl inside and out. Everyone I talk to tells me how she’s always smiling and she’s so caring,’ she wrote.
‘Every morning on the way to school she would say Ma look at my eyes they are beautiful. Always picking on me cause she has long eyelashes and I don’t.’