A 14-year-old girl who was reported missing in 2021 has been reunited with her dad after police found her alive and pregnant in a wardrobe.
Police were tipped off by a member of the public to search a home in Port Huron, Michigan and were shocked to find her bundled into a wardrobe on Tuesday.
But despite the tip off, the search was not easy and the occupants of the house "vehemently denied that they had seen her" and gave the officers some "bogus information."
Deputy Marshal Robert Watson said: "She was pretty upset, she was crying and she was pretty scared. She wasn't sure what was going to be happening to her."
He told the Detroit Free Press: "They wouldn't let us in. They wouldn't allow us to speak with anyone in the house, which were huge red flags for us. The lady said, 'Come back with a search warrant.' So we did."
Then they found her in the hallway wardrobe, just metres away from where two men were watching television while claiming they didn't know where she was.
She was later taken to hospital for a wellness exam, where she was found to be pregnant, Mr Watson said.
Child Protective Services told Mr Watson that her father was "very relieved" that the teen had been found.
Equally, the girl was "ecstatic" to be reunited with her Dad and kept saying: "I wanna be with my dad. I wanna be with my dad."
Mr Watson said: "He [the Dad] had been dealing with this nightmare for a year and a half. And he's in a much better place now.
"When you can bring a child home to their family, especially when they’ve been gone a year and a half, I just couldn’t imagine what that’s like going through, that’s why this mission is so important to me."
Officials told the Detroit Free Press that they are pursuing parental kidnapping charges against the girl's mother, who had custody of the teenager.
Mr Watson authorities believe the mother found her daughter after she ran away and started bouncing the girl around house to house.
The occupants of the house could also be charged with harbouring a fugitive.
