Alert – Father’s astonishing confession about mistake that drove Alisa, 15, into clutches of three pedophiles… before she vanished

For six weeks after a Utah teenager disappeared this spring, her parents feared she may have been dragged off and sexually exploited, or lying dead in a ditch.

But as it turns out, 15-year-old Alisa Petrov was safe in a room she rented in a Colorado Springs trailer park, trying to eke out a life away from an overprotective father.

‘She wanted more freedom than I was giving her, and we obviously need to fix things between us,’ her dad, Nikolai Petrov told the Daily Mail on Wednesday after he and his wife Olga reunited with their daughter here on Monday and flew her home to Utah late Tuesday.

There is no indication that Alisa was abused or held against her will as they feared, he whispered over the phone as if not to jinx their good fortune.

‘It seems that nothing super bad happened,’ he said. ‘She’s doing much better than we expected.’

The South Jordan, Utah, family made headlines when Alisa ran away on April 21, less than a week after her 15th birthday, leaving troubling clues about where she may have been headed.

Her parents discovered shortly after her disappearance that she had been using one of their old iPads to chat online with three adult men in three different states. 

All are now behind bars, accused of exchanging sexual messages with her.

Fifteen-year-old Alisa Petrov was reunited with her family (pictured) on Monday following her six-week disappearance

Her father Nikolai Petrov told the Daily Mail on Wednesday that so far it ‘seems that nothing super bad happened’ and that he and his wife have avoided ‘bombarding her with too many questions’ for now 

According to South Jordan police, the 9th grader skipped out on classes at her charter school about 40 miles south of Salt Lake City on the day she disappeared.

Video evidence showed her buying snacks and provisions at a local convenience store. 

Witnesses said she then hitchhiked to a local train station, hopped on a train, disembarked in nearby Provo and approached several people for help buying a bus ticket to Las Vegas.

Based on her online correspondence, police figured that her goal was to meet Matthew Nicholas Menard, a 35-year-old tech sales executive from Miami on a business trip in Vegas after police say he spent months grooming her online for sex.

Yet Alisa’s trail went cold after she was last spotted in Provo.

Rather than heading south to Sin City, it turns out she hitchhiked 550 miles east to the far more staid Colorado Springs, not far from the headquarters of Focus on the Family. 

She apparently used birthday money and sold her laptop to pay for food and $600 rent for a private room in a trailer home.

‘She said it was tiny, like even smaller than her bathroom at home,’ said Petrov, a software developer.

Alisa admitted she was not exploited and devised a plan to run away from her South Jordan home. While on the run, she dyed her brown hair blond and apparently applied for a job at a local restaurant but was turned down, her father said 

Instead of going to class on the morning of April 21, Alisa was caught on CCTV buying supplies at a nearby gas station and convinced a man there to drive her to the local train station

As he told it, Alisa dyed her brown hair blond and befriended another girl about her age in Colorado Springs. 

She apparently applied for a job at a local restaurant, only to be turned down because she looked too young and raised suspicions by insisting on working for cash.

‘She was angry they wouldn’t hire her,’ Petrov said. ‘And she seemed frustrated that getting by [on her own] was harder than she expected.’

Meanwhile, Petrov, a native Russian, was humbled by the way the town of South Jordan rallied around efforts to find Alisa. 

He was especially touched by the support that the close-knit, mostly Mormon community showed his non-Mormon family who moved to town only a few years ago. 

Neighbors searched for Alisa, classmates posted missing person fliers and complete strangers lined nearby streets with yellow ribbons in her absence.

‘We are grateful so much,’ he said in his thick Russian accent.

The South Jordan Police Department has yet to make public its report about Alisa’s six-week disappearance, which ended when she ran out of cash and walked into a northeastern Colorado Springs police station Sunday night to identify herself. 

On the day Alisa ran away, she skipped school and got on a train to Provo, Utah, then tried to go to Las Vegas to meet one of the alleged pedophiles. He planned to fly her to his home in Miami via Los Angeles

Her father said that after reuniting with her earlier this week, he and his wife have avoided ‘bombarding her with too many questions.’

‘Those will come,’ he added.

The couple has said they were vigilant in protecting their daughter, who reportedly had never spent a night apart from them until she ran away. 

That vigilance included teaching her about the dangers of talking to strangers online, both have said.

‘We regularly check her phone and there was nothing suspicious. Everything seemed to be normal, just classmates, neighbors,’ Olga Petrov told the Daily Mail in May. 

‘We never thought she could be talking to strangers in this way… but she was sneaky and we didn’t know.’

Police say the iPad Alisa was using showed disturbing messages with Menard dating back to mid-January. 

He allegedly wanted to meet her in Vegas, take her to Los Angeles, then fly her to his home in Miami — all while publicly justifying their age difference by purporting to be her father.

Samuel Teancum Mitchell, 41, (left) an accused pedophile, was arrested for allegedly sexually exploiting Alisa online before she disappeared. Police records show Alisa also had been chatting online with William Taylor Glines, 37, (right) from Texas City, Texas, who was arrested May 8

Matthew Nicholas Menard, 35, from Miami was charged with aggravated sexual exploitation of a minor, enticement of a minor and criminal solicitation 

The pair apparently never met in person.

Still, police in Miami seized Menard’s phone on April 30, and he was charged three weeks later with two counts of aggravated sexual exploitation of a minor, enticement of a minor, and three counts of criminal solicitation. 

He surrendered to police in late May.

Police records show Alisa also had been chatting online with William Taylor Glines, 37, from Texas City, Texas, who was arrested May 8 and charged with aggravated sexual exploitation of a minor, attempted aggravated exploitation of a minor, sexual exploitation of a minor, enticement of a minor, and criminal solicitation.

Glines also faces charges for allegedly possessing more than 50 child sexual abuse images or videos.

Alisa’s chats via Snapchat and Discord with a third man, Samuel Teancum Mitchell, 41, revealed ‘that she hates her parents,’ according to an arrest affidavit.

The document showed that she told Mitchell she was suicidal and ‘had started cutting herself,’ and that she asked him several times to ‘kidnap her,’ including from a family ski trip shortly before she ran away.

After she asked, ‘like r we [for real] meeting?? like please confirm please before tonight confirm if we r meeting pls bring condoms.’ Mitchell apparently wrote back saying he was sick and couldn’t meet her.

Alisa’s six-week disappearance ended when she ran out of cash and walked into a northeastern Colorado Springs police station Sunday night to identify herself

Alisa as a young girl with her parents Olga and Nikolai Petrov, who say they did all they could to keep their daughter safe 

Just two days before she disappeared, Alisa messaged him back saying: ‘IM RUNNING AWAY, please don’t contact me,’ alluding to plans she had to meet up with Menard in Vegas, instead.

Mitchell — on whose phone police allegedly found disturbing conversations with and nude images of two other girls, ages 15 and 12 — was arrested in Utah in late May and charged with five counts of sexual exploitation of a minor.

While Alisa was gone, her father said he and police were ‘flooded’ with leads on her whereabouts. 

The only promising tip was a photo of a teenage runaway whom he said was a dead ringer for his daughter, complete with a birthmark on her left cheek that is only slightly lower than one on Alisa’s.

‘She looked so much like Alisa that we kept staring at her picture debating whether that was her,’ he said. Even Alisa admitted the likeness after seeing the picture this week.

‘She went, ‘Wow. That’s my twin!’

As one week of her absence turned into six, Petrov said he, his wife and their other child, a younger son, tried to adjust their expectations. 

He couldn’t take his mind off a statistic he said shows that, of about 27,000 children who run away in the U.S. each year, only about 2% return to their families alive. 

The Daily Mail has not verified the credibility of that number.

In any case, he said: ‘The odds were very much against us. So when we heard she was found, she was alive, it was the happiest moment of my life.’

Petrov was candid about his role in his daughter’s disappearance, acknowledging that, ‘We obviously had some conflicts before she left.’  

Among those, he said, were his insistence that Alisa take more — and higher level — math classes at school and that she not post videos of herself on TikTok.

‘She saw me as being rude, disrespectful, treating her like a child.’

Petrov acknowledged that he’s stricter and more of a hothead than many parents, and ‘not nearly as nice as the Mormons’ who are their neighbors.

‘When I was her age, I hated my dad, too,’ he said of his childhood in the old country. ‘But I understand perfectly now that he was right.’

Petrov said Alisa had ‘mixed feelings’ upon their reunion, eager for the comforts of home but hesitant to return to family dynamics she finds insulting and feels she has outgrown.

Father and mother promised not to punish her if she gave her word she wouldn’t run away again. 

Both sides agreed to undergo family therapy, and to draw up some ground rules in a sort of family contract, if necessary.

All three, Petrov said, ‘are going to need to make some compromises.’

In the meantime, he admitted that he needs to better understand Alisa and to approach her ‘with emotions, not just logic.’ 

He recognized there may be key differences between growing up in 21st century United States and coming of age in Cold War Russia. 

And he acknowledged the possibility that holding on too tightly to his daughter may have led her to flee.

Petrov’s and his wife’s fear that their relationship with Alisa might be irrevocably broken eased at one point a few hours after bringing her home late Tuesday. 

That, he said: ‘Was when she woke up in the middle of the night and came to our room to crawl in next to us.’