Missing teenager cases provide unique challenges for law enforcement

SALT LAKE CITY (ABC4) — Alisa Petrov, the teenager who was missing since April, was found safe in Colorado. When teenagers go missing, it presents unique challenges for law enforcement, but there are also unique approaches to finding them as well.

Jason Jensen has been a private investigator for 16 years. He says social media is a key way to look for missing teenagers to see if there’s more to the story.

“Oftentimes children that go, you know, go run off, run away. they’re at danger of being exploited either for sex or for drugs. You know, they can fall victim to criminality, and we don’t want that as a society,” Jensen said.

Whether it’s checking messages, seeing if they’re posting with their friends somewhere, or if they’re logging on, all these aspects of social media can help police find out what’s going on.

“They’re not active with their friends, they’re off the digital radar,” Jensen said. “That helps law enforcement realize, ok, there may be something.”

On the other hand, he says it’s common for a missing teenager to just be at a friend’s house.

When it’s a female that may be vulnerable to exploitation, or there’s, you know, known communications with adults that are luring that type of a child from the home, then there’s real danger there because we don’t know if they actually met up with one of those individuals.”
Private Investigator Jason Jensen

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The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children provides resources and actively assists families of missing children by providing case management to work directly with the family and law enforcement.

The Utah Department of Public Safety provides a list of resources having to do with missing persons, as well as maintaining a database of missing persons and unidentified persons.