Teen Texts Friends She's Being Followed, Disappears

On the first day of her junior year of high school, 16-year-old Marley Spindler sent her friends a text saying she was being followed, FOX News reports. No one has seen or heard from the South Carolina teen since. On Thursday, Spindler met her friends at Chick-fil-A for breakfast before class. She told them she was going to pick up a 22-year-old she met three weeks prior, and drive him home on her way to school because he was drunk. She never arrived at school. NBC News reports the last Spindler's friends heard from her was a text at 8:42am claiming she was being followed; they thought it was a joke. "We don't know if it's true, but she did send that text," Spindler's father Jayson tells FOX.

Police say they have yet to find any sign of foul play in Spindler's disappearance; they located and interviewed the 22-year-old and don't consider him a person of interest. The teen's car is also missing. Police say evidence on Spindler's cellphone—found that day in a hotel parking lot—shows "she left alone and not under duress or coercion." Surveillance footage from the morning of her disappearance shows Spindler withdrawing money from an ATM. "We can't rule out that she was abducted, but we also have to face that maybe she ran away," Spindler's aunt tells NBC. "We just don't know." FOX notes that a 17-year-old girl disappeared in the same area near Myrtle Beach in 2009 and was never found. (More missing person stories.)