NYC girl, 12, missing after running away from home as her AirTag leads family on search all over city: sister
A 12-year-old Brooklyn girl has been missing since Tuesday after she ran away from home, the girl’s distraught sister told The Post.
Tori Perozo was last seen leaving her home on Ocean Avenue in Prospect Lefferts Gardens around 6:50 a.m. Tuesday morning and heading to The Baccalaureate School for Global Education in Queens, her sister and legal guardian Eliana Perozo said.
At the end of the school day, she took off.
“When school let out, I was watching her on her AirTag” that Perozo put on her house keys, she said.
“I can see her get on the correct train from school … then I saw her go into the city and then once she hit the city I saw her AirTag go up towards the Bronx instead of down towards Brooklyn.”
That’s when I knew that she was at least going somewhere she wasn’t supposed to be going,” Perozo said.
Perozo, who is also Tori’s legal guardian, said she confiscated Tori’s phone the night before for texting an older boy.
When she takes Tori’s phone away, she temporarily replaces it with a flip phone, she said.
Soon after heading uptown, Tori stopped answering her phone and has not been heard from since.
She called her best friend, who is helping Perozo raise Tori, and they tracked down the AirTag back to 134th Street and St. Anne’s Avenue in The Bronx — but she was nowhere to be found.
Two hours later, the tracking device was on the move again, finally stopping at an apartment complex. When another friend went to investigate, they met an apologetic man who had picked up the AirTag off the ground where it had last pinged on 134th Street.
He said he never saw Tori.
NYPD Detectives contacted Perozo Friday and told her they had security footage that caught Tori around 5:45 a.m. Thursday morning getting on the N/R line at the NYU-8th St. subway stop near Astor Place in the East Village.
“That’s just taken an incredible weight off my shoulders and off my sisters’ shoulders who’s here in town with me looking [for Tori],” Perozo said, adding that about 30 people have volunteered to help canvas.
“A lot of people are working hard to find her and she’s really loved and I don’t want this moment to be a defining moment in her life. She’s a really great kid,” she said.
In addition to getting in trouble the night before she went missing, Tori’s also been dealing with the absence of her mother, who Perozo said they haven’t heard from in two months.
“I think she’s a 12-year-old who survived a lot of loss and there’s so much support and mental health services and people that love her and support her — but I feel that’s not the case in her 12-year-old mind so she ran away.”
Tori was last seen wearing a blue hooded sweater with the words “Keith Haring” written in cursive, black and white striped pants, a pair of white Nike Air Force 1s and a pink L.L. Bean backpack, according to police.
A missing persons poster shared online lists her as 5’1” and 160 pounds.
Anyone with information about this incident is asked to call the NYPD’s Crime Stoppers Hotline at 1-800-577-TIPS (8477) or for Spanish, 1-888-57-PISTA (74782).
