A 15-year-old girl who disappeared en route to a Utah treatment center has been found, safe and alive.
The Missouri-based Shawn Hornbeck Foundation said that, acting on an anonymous tip on Nov. 15, two representatives flew to Oakland, Calif., where they were able to find Emily Cecilia Graeber. She was reunited with her parents in St. Louis that evening.
"Our hearts are bursting with joy and gratitude to our friends and family — old and new, near and far — who reached out to us during this most difficult time," Graeber's parents, Ken and Marsha, said in a statement posted on the Web site helpfindemily.com. "To those who helped spread the word via the Web and on the ground in San Francisco, words cannot express how valuable you have been to our efforts."
In many of the tourist areas in San Francisco, fliers were taped up to walls and street lights, pleading for information about Graeber's whereabouts.
Graeber was on-board a Southwest Airlines flight on Oct. 29. She was scheduled to get off in Salt Lake City, where she was to stay at a treatment center in Syracuse. However, authorities said Graeber did not get off the plane and instead continued on to its ultimate destination in Oakland.
"She is said to have befriended someone on that flight who provided her transportation to the Fisherman's Wharf area of San Francisco," the Shawn Hornbeck Foundation said on its Web site.
The foundation was started in response to the 2002 abduction of Shawn Hornbeck, then 11, who disappeared while riding his bicycle near his home in Missouri. Shawn was held captive for 1,558 days before being found in January, living in the company of a man who had abducted him and another child.
E-mail: bwinslow@desnews.com