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Online sleuthing smokes out teenaged runaway

Running away from home isn’t like it used to be. Ask Jazlynn Morell, a 15-year-old from Cliffside Park. Soon after she bolted her single mom’s apartment, investigators with the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office found her — online.

Photo Credit: Cliffview Pilot

With her mother’s permission, investigators monitored Morell’s Internet use and tracked her down to a public housing complex where she’d been staying in the southwest Bronx.

Jazlynn Morell

Bergen County Prosecutor John L. Molinelli didn’t say whether his investigators used Jazlynn’s friends to help smoke her out or simply pretended to be someone else themselves.

Her mother, an aspiring criminologist, told an area newspaper she was worried about what she characterized as Jazlynn’s sudden disappearance on Aug. 25. (See: Was aspiring criminologist’s daughter kidnapped?)

Mariela Souza, a single mom who also has aa 19-year-old daughter, said she was concerned because Jazlynn has attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder — although she never explained how that would have put the teen in any danger.

She also didn’t say whether Jazlynn had run away before, how familiar she already was with the city, or assorted other information an experienced interviewer would ask to determine how dangerous a predicament the teen was in.

Souza suggested her daughter might have been kidnapped, although a law enforcement source with knowledge of the incident said there didn’t appear to be evidence of anything other than that the girl simply had trouble with her mom and ran away.

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