They're trying to trace a little girl: "She is perhaps 12 now, her hair still light blond, but she doesn't smile anymore. Over the last three years, she has appeared in 200 explicit photos that have become highly coveted collectibles for pedophiles trolling the Internet. They have watched her grow up online — the hair getting longer, the look in her eyes growing more distant."
They've got a place - most of the photos are in Disney World. Cleverly, they got that by erasing the girl from the pictures and posting the room interiors on a kind of wanted poster.
But the leads have stopped.
They want to release her face in a sort of wanted poster in an attempt to find and rescue her. But besides the usual privacy issues, releasing the sanitized photo could put the child in incredible danger from her abuser.
Here's the update
(Chicago Trib requires registration - use email=noaccount@mailinator.com / password=noaccount.
Courtesy of Bug Me Not. Have I said I love those guys?)
Mea, 12, didn't know everyone was looking for her.
She wasn't aware that concerned police officers thought she was still caught in a nightmare of abuse, reflected in hundreds of sexually explicit photos of her on the Internet.
And she didn't know that one particular team of Toronto police officers had been so haunted over the years by her image and fate that in February, they asked the public to help find her.
But Mea had been found.
She was safe and with her adoptive mother. They didn't see the news show where the police broadcast sanitized versions of the Internet photos in February and asked for help identifying the background locations. One of the backgrounds turned out to be a hotel at Walt Disney World, a detail that led many to refer to her as "the Disney World girl."
Mea and her mom also missed a follow-up program that asked viewers whether they could identify her friend, described as "a witness to a crime." It wasn't until the FBI called Mea's mother, Faith, last month that they realized Mea had been the subject of an international search.
"If I had seen the pictures, even with her face blanked out, I would have known it was her immediately," said Faith. "But when I heard people talking about it, I just didn't make the connection. Mea had been rescued two years ago."
The man who had used and photographed her for five years, Matthew Alan Mancuso, had been caught in an Internet child-pornography sting in 2003 and is serving 15 years in prison. He was Mea's adoptive father.
Apparently the guy adopted her from an orphanage in Russia, where she'd been put after "her drunken parents had chopped her neck with a large knife." Mancuso told her he had picked her from a video of many children and that she should feel "special." The abuse was phenomenal, even down to her diet - he would feed her raw vegetables and plain spaghetti to try and keep her body from going into puberty. When found, she weighed 52 pounds . . . at age 10.
Fortunately, she's got a new mom and is getting what I presume is some very serious counseling:
Last year, Mea had her first birthday party. She quickly bloomed after she eased into a healthy diet, discovered a talent for art and hand-painted her bedroom walls. Her favorite color is purple, and she regards the care and protection of her pet hamster, a chittering bundle of fur, as a solemn duty.
She has frequent slumber parties with her school friends, their sleeping bags scrunched together on the floor of the modest living room as they paint one another's toenails and chatter halfway until sunrise.
Mea can sleep through most nights now without awaking in terror, and the times that she does, Faith gently rocks her, talks to her and softly prays, just as one of Faith's foster mothers did for her. . .
Mea is graceful and deliberate, unrecognizable as the girl in the Internet pictures. Her smile is wide and genuine, and her eyes sparkle. With her friends, she can be a cut-up, a clown, posing happily for photos in silly wigs and costumes.
She's also working with prosecutors to bring additional charges against her rapist; the current 15 years is being served for child porn only, and doesn't begin to touch her abuse.
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