Waitress Listens to Gut, Helps Find Missing Teens

2 girls stopped at restaurant after disappearing in Maine
By Arden Dier,  Newser Staff
Posted Nov 10, 2015 12:31 PM CST
Updated Nov 14, 2015 4:32 PM CST
Waitress Listens to Gut, Helps Find Missing Teens
   (Shutterstock)

A waitress is being called a hero after helping point parents and police to two girls who vanished in Maine last month. Lisa Stephenson was waiting tables at the Blue Crab Grill in Newark, Del., when two young girls came in asking for jobs. "They said they were traveling and their phones and wallets were stolen in New York," she tells the Bangor Daily News. They left job applications noting neither had finished high school, but no address or phone number. "It didn't add up," says Stephenson, 26. “It seemed odd for teen girls not to have cellphones, nowadays,” she tells Yahoo. When Stephenson got home, she searched their names on Facebook and found the girls, 14 and 16, had disappeared in Maine a day earlier on Oct. 25, along with a car belonging to the younger girl's mother, and may have been heading for South Carolina. Stephenson reached out to the older girl's mother and then to local police.

The next day, after receiving other concerned calls, authorities found the girls panhandling in front of a strip mall about 100 miles away in Waldorf, Md. An officer took them to a district station where a social worker picked them up. They were reunited with their mothers on Oct. 28. While the younger's girl's mother drove her car back home, the other woman took the girls to the Blue Crab Grill, where they thanked Stephenson in person. On Facebook, the mother praised Stephenson as "a hero—a person who trusted her gut when she saw two young girls all alone and helped." But Stephenson is rejecting the title. “I don’t feel like a hero,” she tells Yahoo. “I just feel like a normal person who needed to speak up and did." (This teen just discovered that he'd been "missing" for 13 years.)

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