A rural community on the edge of the nation’s largest American Indian reservation mourned the death of an 11-year-old girl Tuesday as authorities pored over remote stretches of the Navajo Nation in search of the man who abducted her and her younger brother.
A stranger kidnapped Ashlynne Mike and her brother, Ian, after the school bus dropped them off Monday afternoon, authorities and family members say. The man approached them and a third boy, asking them if they wanted to see a movie. The boys said no, but Ashlynne was somehow lured into the man’s van.
The girl’s brother didn’t want his sister to go alone so he went with her, relatives say. Police gleaned some information about the suspect after a passing driver found the boy later Monday.
Scared and in the dark, he had run more than 2 miles to the highway from a desolate spot where the kidnapper had taken the children. He told authorities the man and his sister walked out into the hills but the man came back alone.
The boy was distraught, said Darrell Foster-Joe, the children’s aunt.