Courtesy: Martin County Sheriff's Office
INDIANTOWN, Fla. - Two missing Florida girls are back home and a 19-year-old man from Nebraska is behind bars after deputies say he kidnapped them after they met on the gaming app Roblox.
What we know:
According to the Martin County Sheriff’s Office, deputies responded to a service call around 8 p.m. regarding a pair of missing sisters who were 12 and 15 years old.
Family members told deputies that the girls went to a park in Indiantown around 9 a.m. that morning. They were brought back home and their cell phones were taken away as punishment.
The sisters’ family told deputies that the girls may be with someone they had been communicating with on Snapchat.
READ: Nancy Guthrie: Ransom note claim prompts sheriff to release a statement
The deputies saw that the SnapChat app was deleted from the girls’ phone so they reloaded the app on the phone and saw conversations between the girls and the suspect.
Those conversations revealed that the suspect, later identified as 19-year-old Hser Mu Lah Say, was on his way to Indiantown to pick up the girls and leave.
"We were dealing with a type of abduction," Martin County Sheriff John Budensiek stated. "We know these girls went willingly, but their age suggested that they had been taken and were probably being removed from our area. That didn’t stop us, however, from searching local motels, local areas, local parks trying to find these young girls. It was literally freezing in Indiantown that night. We were in full crisis mode."
Dig deeper:
Budensiek said the communication between the girls and the man began in the summer of 2025 on the gaming app Roblox and then eventually moved to Snapchat.
Family said they noticed strange things like gifts, specifically food, showing up to the house.
READ: Lyft driver accused of choking and threatening to kill passenger
Detectives pieced together a timeline and said the suspect left Omaha, Nebraska on Friday morning and drove straight through to Indiantown, arriving on Saturday around 10 a.m.
Courtesy: Martin County Sheriff's Office
Initially, investigators said the girls planned to meet him at the park, but they were taken back home, and their phones were taken away.
They learned that the suspect was taking I-75 to head back to Nebraska, so the detectives contacted the Florida Highway Patrol and the Georgia State Police.
"There’s nothing good with a grown man coming into the state of Florida, removing two teenage girls, troubled teenage girls, taking them to Omaha, Nebraska," Budensiek stated.
Courtesy: Martin County Sheriff's Office
The Georgia State Police pulled the vehicle over and took Lah Say into custody and rescued the girls.
The sheriff noted that the girls were found about five minutes before an Amber Alert was issued for them. He said if it was sent out earlier, the suspect would know the information law enforcement had on him, including details about his car and where they believed he was headed with the girls.
READ: Body found inside truck submerged in Plant City pond during search for missing man: HCSO
What they're saying:
"In this case, I think we prevented something disastrous," Budensiek said. "Do we know what would have happened? No, none of us do, but we went through the devices we had available to us at the time. We’ve not seen anything explicit, necessarily, but the suspect was repeatedly warning these young girls that he could get into a lot of trouble for what he was about to do. He knew he was violating the law. We knew that if we didn’t find those girls in a timely manner and everyone did not do what they did to find these girls, they would be in Omaha, Nebraska, missing."
Lah Say has been charged with two counts of kidnapping and two counts of interference with child custody.
Courtesy: Martin County Sheriff's Office
What's next:
Lah Say is awaiting extradition back to Martin County.
The Source: This article was written with information posted online by the Martin County Sheriff’s Office and presented during a press conference.