Sixteen-year-old New Jersey girl Kara Alongi has gotten herself into quite a mess after a seemingly panicked tweet she sent caught fire and convinced much of the Internet she was missing — she seems to have just run away from home. “There is somone in my hour ecall 911,” Alongi wrote yesterday evening, typos and all, around the same time investigators now say she called a taxi. In the eighteen hours since, the message has been retweeted more than 32,000 times, many of them affixed with the hashtag #helpfindkara, and Alongi has collected close to 100,000 followers.
The Star-Ledger reports that police found no signs of forced entry at the Alongi home and a door was left unlocked:
Police then found that someone called a local taxi company asking for a car at Alongi’s address around the same time as the tweet, and a cab driver confirmed that he dropped off a person matching the girl’s description at the Rahway train station.
“We don’t feel any foul play was involved,” said local police chief Alan Scherb, but nonetheless, the department received about 6,000 calls related to the case. As Gawker points out, “Like its boring old relative, cable news, there is nothing that gets social media more excited than a missing white teenage girl.”
Now authorities believe Alongi, who left her cell phone behind, may be scared to come home knowing the chaos she’s caused. Many in the Twitter mob have not yet gotten the memo, while others have twisted it into a punch line: “#HelpfindKara a good lawyer.” The cops, probably in an attempt to coax her back, insisted, “Right now we are not looking at any charges.” But somebody is at least getting grounded.
