Parents should heed well a warning given by Freehold Township police Detective Marty Boutote in a story in this week’s Independent.
In a phrase, stop letting your children sit for hours on their computers, chatting on the Internet with people who are strangers, some of whom would do them harm if given the opportunity.
That, in essence, was Boutote’s warning after detailing the circumstances of a case he investigated within the past week. Luckily for the people involved — a 14-year-old girl from Freehold Township and a 19-year-old male from Oklahoma — the situation in which they found themselves did not end in tragedy.
In this particular case, which Boutote believes is the first of its kind in Freehold Township, the 14-year-old girl convinced her friend from Oklahoma, whom she had met online several months earlier, to come and take her away from New Jersey. Personal problems at home were apparently at the root of her request.
On Nov. 25, the night the girl left home with plans to rendezvous with her friend, he arrived in Freehold Township unable to pay a $70 cab fare from Trenton. He had reached Trenton by bus from Oklahoma. The cab driver informed police of the problem, and officers shortly found out why he had come to Western Monmouth County. About two hours later, police officers found the girl and reunited her with her parents.
It is frightening to think how close the girl and the young man came to carrying out their plan — which was to board a bus and leave New Jersey behind.
Who knows if her parents and law enforcement authorities would ever have been able to track her down and bring her home.
There is a lesson to be learned in all of this, and Boutote was emphatic in delivering it to parents.
"A parent should not allow a juvenile to sit in his or her bedroom chatting on the computer for hours without knowing who that juvenile is talking to," the police detective said.
"This should not be tolerated. Children think they know who they are talking to, but that person might not be the person the child believes him or her to be. In this case it turned out that the person the juvenile was chatting with was who he said he was, but that is not always the case. This type of incident can and does happen."
Parents have the power — and the responsibility — to see that it does not.