Mabel Pantaleon Found: Missing Actress With Manic Depression Disorder Found at Airport
Actress was reportedly found at JFK attempting to purchase a plane ticket.
July 27, 2012 — -- Mabel Pantaleon, the New York actress who vanished from her home Sunday, was found at John F. Kennedy airport attempting to purchase a plane ticket.
Pantaleon, 31, who has manic-depressive disorder, has appeared on the "Dexter" and "Mystery ER." She was picked up by New York Port Authority police Thursday evening, Sgt. John Buthorn of the New York Police Department told ABC News.
"She was in [Port Authority's] custody on Thursday evening. She was in good condition, and there was nothing suspicious," Buthorn said.
The actress was reportedly trying to buy a ticket when her name popped up on a police database, at which point authorities were notified of her whereabouts. Pantaleon was taken by authorities to the psychiatric emergency room at Jamaica Hospital at 9:20 p.m. Thursday.
Pantaleon's mother, Sylvia Pantaleon, expressed relief that her daughter had been found.
"Everything is over, thank God. She's OK, and she is in the hospital," her mother told ABC News on Friday. "Thank god for everything .. that this is over now."
On Thursday Sylvia Pantaleon told ABC News that she believed her daughter had gone off her medication. Before her daughter disappeared, said her mother, she had accosted family members and accused them of being terrorists.
"She was staying with me. She saw something on the Internet and got very upset, and she started saying a lot of weird things," Sylvia Pantaleon told ABC News Thursday.
"She said, 'I'm leaving from here, all of you are terrorists, you're not my mother. I knew it wasn't her," her mother said.
Her mother told how Pantaleon had been drawn to acting and moved to California but soon returned to stay at her mother's apartment for a year before taking an apartment on Forty-Fifth Street in Manhattan. But Pantaleon lost that apartment, and was back staying with her mother.
Pantaleon, who studied at the New York City College of Technology before pursuing acting, finished second runner-up in the Miss Latina New York USA Pageant in 2003, according to her IMDB profile.
Her mother told ABC News that she'd called the police as soon as her daughter vanished Sunday but couldn't officially report her missing until 24 hours had passed.
She also said that her daughter did not have a boyfriend at the time she disappeared.
"That was one of her problems. She doesn't have friends, she doesn't have boyfriends," she said.
In addition to appearing as a server on "Dexter" in 2008, that same year Pantaleon portrayed a nurse on the Discovery Health Channel reality series "Mystery ER." She launched her acting career on the same network's "Untold Stories of the ER" series in 2006, then went on to appear in feature films, including "Choose Connor," "Double Down" and "The Gleam."