Family Fears Missing Texas Girl in Trouble

Feb. 7, 2008— -- The moment was caught on tape Tuesday afternoon: A Texas teen sitting with her friends outside school after the academic day had ended. A pickup truck pulls in and the high school freshman approaches the passenger window, engages in a brief exchange, and climbs into the truck, sandwiching herself between two unknown men who looked closer to age 20.

Sarah Coronado, the 14-year-old girl who was carried away in a white Dodge truck from her Houston high school, has not been seen since.

"We love her and we want her to come back regardless of what happened," her father, Raymond Coronado, told ABC News. "And we don't care how she approaches us."

Authorities are combing through the family's home computer for leads after Raymond said he feared his daughter may have recently met someone online. She uses MySpace and Yahoo chat rooms, he said.

He described his daughter as a good student who plays the cello in the school orchestra but acknowledged that this year, as she moved from middle school to high school, her grades took a downturn.

"She has struggled, and I think it's all been part of her social interactions and the group she is running in," he said. "It's what I would consider a classic teenage revolt."

Raymond also said that the teen was not abusing drugs or alcohol, as far as he and his wife knew.

Texas authorities, led by a Harris County constable's office, are growing increasingly concerned about the teen's welfare, even though she apparently left voluntarily with the unidentified men.

"The biggest thing is that she is 14 years old and in Texas, that's a child," Sgt. Rick Holloman, spokesman for the Harris County Precinct 2 constable office, told ABC News. "Fourteen-year-olds in Texas cannot make their own decisions."

Police have spent the past two days tracking down leads, Holloman said. Some have been promising, but the majority have proved fruitless. They have spoken repeatedly to Sarah's friends. "She has not contacted anyone to our knowledge," Holloman said.

One friend told police that the teen used her cell phone to call someone around 3:30 p.m. Tuesday, after her own phone had died and before she left in the pickup truck with the two men.

The phone records for the number that Sarah Coronado called were subpoenaed, Holloman said, but the man who owns the phone that was called has a "rock solid alibi."

The man told authorities, however, that he had let someone he only knew by a first name use his phone around the same time. Police are trying to determine who fielded the phone call Sarah Coronado made on her friend's phone.

But Holloman also acknowledged that information provided by Sarah Coronado's friends, as well as many of the tips, have not all been that reliable. "It's always Suzy told Betty told someone else," he said, "all the way down the line."

Raymond Coronado thanked the efforts of law enforcement but challenged the state's determination that his daughter's case did not merit an Amber Alert because she ran away and was not technically abducted.

"What we have not been able to accomplish is an actual Amber Alert," he said. "There's no way she would have voluntarily been gone for this long. She's never had any interaction away from the house that's unsupervised."

Compounding the family's frustration, he said, have been images flashed on electronic billboards of Adrian Jaimes, a 5-year-old boy who was abducted in front of his family in Austin by three Hispanic men.

That type of exposure, Raymond said, could only help in the search for his daughter, who he fears made a bad decision to climb into that truck Tuesday.

"She wanted to express herself, and it's something that's dominoed way off course," he said. "She is not a streetwise kid in any way shape or form."

Sarah Coronado is described as 5 feet 2 inches tall, weighing about 150 pounds. She has brown hair, brown eyes and was wearing a dark blue shirt, white and green tennis shoes and khaki pants.

The two unidentified men were described as between 19 and 22 and of Hispanic descent. They were driving a white Dodge pickup truck.