“We just had a good reunion,” said Mark Baker, Destiny Montelongo’s grandfather. “She’s in good shape. She is not harmed.”
Miss Montelongo had been missing for nearly 24 hours. Her mother called police a few hours after she didn’t come home from school on the bus Tuesday.
Morgan’s Point police were interviewing the girl late Wednesday afternoon to determine where she had been. The grandfather said he did not know who gave her a ride into Temple, but that she had spent the night with a friend.
“I guess she decided to come home,” Baker said.
Baker had just returned to Temple from Morgan’s Point, where he had been posting flyers in the neighborhood where his granddaughter lives and was last seen.
“We had been home for about 10 minutes when she knocked on the door,” he said.
The whole incident may be tied to something that happened at school on Tuesday, said Randy Dixon, Morgan’s Point police chief. Miss Montelongo attends Lake Belton Middle School.
“She had an issue at school,” Dixon said. “She was unhappy and may have been afraid she would get in trouble when she got home.”
School officials could not comment about what may have happened at school but expressed relief Wednesday that Miss Montelongo was found safe.
At noon Dixon described the parents as distraught that they could not locate their daughter.
By that time a dive team had spent hours searching the waters of an inlet at Lake Belton blocks from the girl’s house.
The divers searched from 7 to 10:30 p.m. on Tuesday before resuming the search around 11 a.m. Wednesday.
A concerned neighbor had reported seeing Miss Montelongo walking by the water. Searchers found her shoes, sweatshirt and school books on the bank.
A Morgan’s Point police officer spent the morning at Lake Belton Middle School interviewing friends and teachers of Miss Montelongo in hopes of finding a lead to where she might be located.
At one point a search team out of Waco used bloodhounds to track the girl’s scent in an effort to locate her.
In addition, police searched the family’s computer and looked for evidence on Internet social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook.
“We just want to be sure that we’re thorough,” Dixon said as search was being conducted.
Dixon described the outpouring from the community as “phenomenal.” He said he told most people that the plan was to let the professionals handle it first.
