HER mother said she’d been snatched by sex traffickers when she disappeared from Las Vegas.
Their emotional Youtube video appeal for public help to find Sarah Dunsey went viral.
So did the video of their emotional family reunion in Utah, after she turned up a month later in Venice, California, with two males.
But now it appears Las Vegas and Utah police aren’t buying the tale of kidnapping and sex trafficking.
They told the Dailymail.com Sarah was not kidnapped, and there’s “no evidence and sex trafficking crime occurred”.
The 17-year-old had also left the MGM Grand Hotel, where her parents said she had last been seen before disappearing on January 15, “willingly” and “without putting up a struggle,” the website reported.
“Her mother told us that she was taken by sex traffickers. We found that not to be true,” Officer Michael Rodriguez, of the Las Vegas Police Department, said.
‘There was no kidnap. She was not kidnapped in Las Vegas and as far as we are concerned, there is no evidence that any crime has occurred.”
Sarah disappeared on January 15, and was reported missing when she failed to come home after a holiday with friends in Las Vegas.
The family said Sarah had been abducted, and begged people to help with the search.
“Our daughter Sarah Dunsey was abducted from Las Vegas, Nevada; she’s being held against her will and Sarah is a victim of sex trafficking,” Dunsey’s mother said in the video posted to YouTube.
Speaking directly to the camera, she said: “Sarah Bearah, this message is for you. I want you to fight because I need you. All of us need you. So fight OK. We’re coming to get you.”
Sources at the police department also revealed police were not told the 17-year-old Utah student was missing until two weeks after she vanished.
Police have pieced together a timeline of the mysterious disappearance, dating all the way back to Christmas, which Sarah spent with her mother in St George in Utah.
She was due to return to her father and stepmother’s home in Logan, Utah on January 3.
It’s unclear why she didn’t, and instead travelled to Vegas with a male friend, who told police he saw her leaving MGM Gand with two other men.
Her father reported her missing to the Logan Police on January 16.
The family told the Daily Mail they mounted their own search, not going public initially for fear publicity would alert the “kidnappers”.
On February 5 they launched they pleaded publicly on social media for Sarah’s safe return on Valentine’s Day (February 14).
Three days later, Sarah was discovered in an apartment in Venice Beach, California, in the company of two males, whose names haven’t been released.
Sarah’s family denied Sarah was a runaway and have said they now hope the FBI investigation will produce results.
Sarah’s father, Todd, told the Daily Mail “people have said things like, ‘she was a runaway, she meant to leave Las Vegas’. She didn’t. She was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“I said to her, ‘did you never think to try to run away [from her captors]?’ And she said, ‘No — you don’t understand. Everybody is connected and they watch and you have to be careful what you say, you have to be careful what you do’.”
The FBI have still not confirmed or denied if she was taken in connection with human sex trafficking. Police have also refused to say whether there have been any arrests in relation to her disappearance.