A 14-year-old Pennsylvania girl has been missing for more than a month — and her parents fear she may have found herself swept up by predators she met online.
Aubrey Wu — who also goes by Enci — vanished from her Palmer Township home on Jan. 10 when she slipped out a bathroom window and ran off into the winter cold with little more than a sweatshirt and yoga pants.
Grainy security footage filmed at a Wawa convenience store a town away the next day appeared to capture Enci bundled up in a coat and hat — but nothing has been seen or heard from her since, the girl’s distraught parents told The Post.
“It’s a parent’s worst nightmare,” said Enci’s stepfather, John Gehrmann. “We’re trying to find our daughter before we end up as a statistic.”
And the parents fear the clock is running out, telling The Post that Enci seemed to be in the throes of a mental health episode when she took off.
An exceptionally bright child who regularly aces her schoolwork, Enci’s parents say she has nevertheless struggled for years with mental health troubles and spends a prolific amount of time online. They called that a dangerous combination that’s led to her being preyed upon by creeps from across the world.
“She’s missing, and she could be anywhere from California to Saudi Arabia based on the things we saw on her secret social media accounts that she was using pretty much 24 hours a day,” Gehrmann said.
The day before Enci ran off, she and her parents had a fight over devices she’d hidden from them and which they say she’d been using to communicate with such people online.
The family fears that a predator she met online might have convinced Enci to flee home, and that she might have run off with them and gotten herself into grave danger.
“It’s really, really scary for us right now because for years this is what everybody was terrified about. Her just finally saying ‘I’ve had enough and I’m going out,’ and running out into the wind, into the arms of somebody,” Gehrmann said.
Enci whereabouts are unclear — few leads have turned up since she was spotted outside the Wawa.
If Enci’s parents’ worst fears prove true, they would be similar to the case of Emmarae Gervasi, a 14-year-old Long Island girl who vanished for 25 days in December and was later found to have been kidnapped and forced into sex by a ring.
The girl was allegedly held prisoner, drugged and pimped out against her will, before her father finally rescued her from a docked boat where she was being kept after receiving an anonymous tip. Twelve suspects have been arrested in that case.
Anybody with information on Enci’s whereabouts has been asked to call the Palmer Township Police, which didn’t return a request for comment.
The teen’s parents have also hired a private investigator in hopes of tracking her down.
“We need help, this is a dire situation with a young girl who has mental health issues,” Gehrmann said, describing Enci as a typical teen who loves Billie Eilish.
“We’ve just been trying to just get people to understand is going on.”
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