One day before she turned herself in at a small Montana police station, 18-year-old Alicia Navarro, who went missing at age 14 from Arizona in 2019, allegedly threatened she would “go back” during a heated argument with the man she had been living with some 40 miles from the Canadian border.
“I was here the other day and I heard them yelling,” 22-year-old neighbor Garrett Smith told the New York Post. “She did say, ‘I will go back.’ But that’s all I heard.”
“It was the day before she turned herself in,” he confirmed.
Navarro, a high-functioning autistic teen, left a note for her parents, stating, “I ran away. I will be back, I swear. I’m sorry,” before disappearing from her Glendale, Arizona, home four years ago, sparking a search that ended when she walked into a local police precinct and requested to be removed from the missing persons’ list, BizPac Review reported on Thursday.
14-yr-old Arizona teen who vanished four years ago shows up alive and well in Montana https://t.co/GwvWJOiGMN via @BIZPACReview
— BPR based (@DumpstrFireNews) July 27, 2023
“She is by all accounts safe. She is by all accounts healthy, and she is by all accounts happy,” Officer Jose Miguel Santiago of the Glendale police said during a news conference.
“Since her disappearance, our men and women here have been working tirelessly around the clock to not only bring closure to this family but to make sure Alicia gets everything she possibly needs,” he said.
Details of Navarro’s disappearance and happy return remain sketchy, and it is unknown how long the teen had been living in the Havre apartment.
According to Smith, she and a man in his 20s already lived there when he moved in roughly a year ago.
“I would see both of them walking out,” he said. “Quite often. I think I saw them holding hands once when they were leaving.”
“They were very shy, closed-off people,” he added.
Smith told The Post that, though he had seen her about 30 times while living at the apartment, he first spoke to a “scared” Navarro only days before she turned herself in. The teen addressed him as “mister” and said she was “looking for her uncle” near a post office.
“She was asking for directions,” Smith said, noting that Navarro didn’t appear to know her way around the area. “She looked scared.”
“She said she was walking with her uncle and got lost and she’s looking for 6th Street,” he explained. “I later found out that she was referring to him as her uncle.”
Smith said Navarro’s voice sounded “scratchy” and the braces she wore on her teeth were in need of some attention.
“Her braces looked pretty bad,” he recalled. “She had braces on when she went missing in Arizona in 2019. It looked like she still had the same braces on.”
According to Smith’s girlfriend, 23-year-old Megan Alexander, the couple watched Navarro enter a “random house” and assumed she had found the assistance she was seeking.
Smith had spoken previously to the unnamed man Navarro was living with.
Coincidentally, Smith was originally from a town just nine miles from where the young girl went missing in Arizona.
“When I first moved in, he came up to me and asked why I moved to Havre,” Smith said. “I told him [I’m from] Phoenix, Arizona and after that he got quiet and bridged off. He wanted to end the conversation almost like I don’t want to talk about Arizona.”
On Wednesday, Smith said Feds and a slew of police officers had arrived at the building. He believes Navarro is still living in the apartment.
By Friday, police said they had detained and questioned a man in connection to the girl’s disappearance, but it remains unclear if it is the same man with whom Navarro was living.
Meanwhile, the teen had, as of Thursday, only “spoken briefly” to her overjoyed mom, according to the family’s private investigators.
Navarro assured police that she had not been hurt, was not being held against her will, and was free to come and go as she pleased, The Post reports. According to police, she is not facing criminal charges.
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Melissa Fine is the former executive editor of Casino Player, Strictly Slots, and Poker
Digest magazines. She is a UCLA graduate, news junkie, and dedicated Stargate SG-
1 fan. Melissa currently lives with her dog and two cats in a tiny town in the Sierra
Nevada foothills.
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