Cyber-Link Triggers 1st Vermont Amber Alert
Dive team joins search for Brooke Bennett, 12, who may have arranged a meeting.
June 27, 2008— -- The search for a 12-year-old girl who police fear may have been taken by someone she met online has triggered the state of Vermont to issue its first Amber Alert.
Brooke Bennett of Braintree, Vt., has been missing since 9 a.m. Wednesday, when an uncle dropped her at a Cumblerand Farms convenience store in nearby Randolph. The girl had told her family she was being picked up by a female friend to visit the friend's relative at a hospital just across the state line in New Hampshire.
But that apparently never happened.
Authorities now believe the story was a lie concocted by Brooke to conceal her real plan: an arrangement to meet up with someone she had met online, perhaps, her father thinks, through the social networking Web site MySpace. "Through investigation it was learned that Ms. Bennett was communicating with an unknown individual online," the Vermont State Police wrote in a lengthy press release that accompanied the Amber Alert announcement.
Surveillance footage from the Cumberland Farms store, which police have so far declined to release, showed the girl being dropped off. Instead of meeting the friend, she is seen walking away from the store, alone, toward the village of Randolph, police say.
She was not reported missing by family members until 9 p.m. Wednesday night.
Early Thursday, clothing similar to what the girl had been wearing was recovered in Brookfield, 10 miles north of Randolph.
The discovery triggered an intense ground search of the area by the state police search and rescue team and dogs from two different departments. "The items have been sent to the Vermont Forensic Laboratory for examination," according to the release.
Dive teams will search Sunset Lake today, a body of water near where the clothing was found, according to the State Police .
Fliers featuring Bennett's image have been posted in towns throughout the rural stretch of Vermont by police and volunteers.
They have not yet determined who Brooke may have been talking to online, but they are looking at Brooke's computer . "Members of the Computer Crime Unit are currently examining the computer used by Ms. Bennett in an attempt to isolate and identify whom she was speaking with online before being reported missing."
