'Missing' actress found in jail

An aspiring Puerto Rican actress whose parents feared she had been kidnapped and sold into the sex slave has been located in jail.

Police in south Florida spent days searching for Edmarie Lafontaine-Perez, 21, before learning that she was safe, albeit stuck behind bars in a Miami-Dade jail.

Lafontaine-Perez was arrested on January 21 and charged with defrauding an innkeeper and resisting arrest.

Lafontaine-Perez was booked under the alias Tieres Rodriguez-Perez, making her parents' attempts to track her down extraordinarily difficult.

After moving from her native Puerto Rico to South Florida last December, her parents feared she had become mixed up in the wrong crowd.

Lafontaine-Perez's mother began frantically searching for her daughter after receiving a strange phone call on January 26.

Speaking in disjointed sentences, Lafontaine-Perez told her mother that she was "scared for her life" and "was being chased".

"We don't want to think about that and punish ourselves but it’s a possibility she may be a victim of human trafficking," her terrified father Edwin Lafontaine said at the time.

The Department of Homeland Security became involved in the case and located the woman's belongings in a hotel room at a Fort Lauderdale motel, but she was nowhere to be seen.

That is until Lafontaine-Perez was located in a nearby jail.

Lafontaine-Perez's parents, who still have no idea how their daughter ended up in jail, will be reunited with her this week. 

Source: New York Daily News

Author: Natasha Lee, Approving editor: Simon Black