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Teen's text messages give mom chills

Her 15-year-old daughter’s lewd exchange with a stranger reminds her mother of the circumstances of the girl’s friends dath.

By THOMAS LAKE
Published June 17, 2006

PORT RICHEY — The phone is a white Motorola cell, wrapped in camouflage tape. It surfs the Web. It sends and receives text. And in the hands of a 15-year-old girl this month, it became a portal for late night sex chat.

When the girl’s mother found the text messages, her mind flooded with horror.

It reminded her of the way her daughter’s best friend died two years ago.

After online chats with someone whose screen name included the word “killa,” Amanda Lankey was found in the Michigan woods, her skull shattered by a blunt instrument.

The Port Richey mother — she and her daughter are not named to protect them —filed a report with the Pasco Sheriff’s Office, said spokesman Kevin Doll. But authorities say it appears there was no crime because there was no direct solicitation for sex, just dirty talk.

The girl had bought her first cell phone last month.

Her mother said she probably used it to access an Internet chat room, where she met the person at the other end of the text messages.

On June 5, the girl messaged in the morning dark while her mother slept a few feet away.

He: “Hey baby i wanna role play. Asl?” (Shorthand for age, sex, location.)

She: “15/f/fl u.”

He: “Im 17 m nm (New Mexico) do you have a pic baby?”

She: “NO.”

“Oh well. What do you look like?”

“Brown hair an eyes 125 slim.”

“Nice. What are you wearing right now bab.”

Then the messages from both sides turned sexually explicit.

A few days later, the girl’s siblings discovered the messages and alerted the mother. She called the Sheriff’s Office on Friday.

“This could be a pedophile,” she said.

Two things suggest the caller was lying about himself. He did not state his age until after she stated hers. And his area code was in Utah, not New Mexico. Both deceptions are tricks of cyberpredators.

But deputies aren’t pursuing anyone. Neither an FBI spokeswoman nor a local prosecutor could think of any laws the caller had broken.

Yet the incident has left the mother tormented by fear.

Her daughter keeps mementos in a shoebox, her memory box.

Inside is a purple folder labeled “Amanda’s Death,” which holds press clippings about her friend’s murder.

Amanda was spending summer 2004 with relatives in White Cloud, Mich., the Associated Press reported. Between 2:30 and 4:30 a.m. on June 21, 2004, she sneaked out of a friend’s house, apparently to meet someone.

About two weeks later, mushroom hunters discovered her pajama-clad body in the Manistee National Forest. Copies of search warrants obtained by a Grand Rapids TV station showed she had been chatting online with a user whose screen name began with the words “skit-zo_killa.”

After the text message incident in Port Richey, the mother grounded her daughter. She also took away the camouflage phone.

Still, she wondered why deputies weren’t pursuing the Utah caller.

“What are you going to tell me when my daughter’s murdered?” she said in a rising voice. “I’m sorry?”

Thomas Lake can be reached at tlake@sptimes.com or 1-800-333-7505, ext. 6245.

[Last modified June 17, 2006, 23:03:28]