BRONX, N.Y. (WPIX) — A 13-year-old girl in New York City who disappeared for 10 days in April has once again gone missing, police said Friday.
Mariah Sanchez, from the Bronx, was previously found at a hotel in Poughkeepsie — more than 80 miles from her home — after she and a 13-year-old family friend hopped on a bus near Yankee Stadium earlier this year.
Law enforcement officers were tipped off to the girls’ whereabouts after the 13-year-old friend left the hotel and called her parents. Sanchez was discovered at a Red Roof Inn in a room with an older woman, a man in his 20s, and a pit bull.
On Thursday, Sanchez once again went missing after leaving a Bronx Care Health Center at around 11:30 a.m.
Police told WPIX she had been staying with foster parents before she disappeared.
After the first rescue, Sanchez was evaluated at a hospital. She also posted messages to Instagram alleging that she had a troubled childhood. She also called out people she felt had neglected her.
“Y’all be so fake, ya love me n wish me the best but in ma worse moments y’all was Neva there,” she wrote in one post. “I fought my battles alone.”
In the same post, the teen accused family members of abuse — something that’s upsetting to her father, who told WPIX that her allegation “baffles my mind.”
“Not under my care,” Christian Sanchez said.
The father said Sanchez had a difficult childhood while living in Orange County with her mom.
“She’s been like a gypsy, bouncing around from home to home,” Christian Sanchez said. “She was always left somewhere, like, for example, with her uncle, my mother, her aunt.”
Christian Sanchez said his mother was caring for Mariah for two years before the girl came to live with him in the Bronx in September.
“I’ve done the best I could as a father,” he said. “I just recently became a full-time father with her.”
He added that he thinks his daughter doesn’t want structure in her life.
“I don’t think she understands the danger,” Sanchez said of his daughter’s repeated disappearances. He also hopes to regain custody.
“They want me to take parenting classes, which I am taking,” he said.
Police are urging anyone with information on Sanchez’s whereabouts to call the NYPD‘s Crime Stoppers hotline at 1–800–577–TIPS (8477), or 1–888–57–PISTA (74782) for Spanish.