In the hours after she was kidnapped, Madelyn Allen, a Utah college student who went missing last week, sent a cryptic text to her parents.
Allen, a student at Snow College in Ephraim, was reunited with her family on Dec. 18, just less than a week after she was first reported missing. The 19-year-old was last spotted leaving her dorm around 9:22 p.m. on Dec. 13.
Just hours later, one of her parents received a text that sparked some concern.
“I love you,” Allen wrote, seemingly out of nowhere, in a message sent around 7:20 a.m. the following morning.
According to a probable cause affidavit obtained by PEOPLE, the random text was enough for them to seek out additional information from Verizon. The cellphone carrier in turn revealed the text was sent from the small town of Loa, about 87 miles south of Ephraim.
The phone proved of even further use in the desperate search for Allen after authorities discovered messages on the device “that led them to believe that she may have been exposed to individuals with dangerous intentions and motives.” What’s more, investigators on Dec. 18 discovered additional cell phone pings in Loa, allowing them to focus their efforts on the small town, with a population of about 500.
“Law enforcement, just pure foot-to-the-pavement, knocked on almost every door in Loa,” Sanpete County Attorney Kevin L. Daniels told the magazine. “We didn’t know she was in Loa; we knew that her last pinged location was in Loa.”
Originally Posted by bowieluva
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