TULSA, Okla. — A mother said she is grateful her 9-year-old daughter is safe after she went missing earlier Monday and her school did not know where she was. She is still questioning how her daughter managed to leave campus without anyone noticing.
Ashley Moses said she was working from home when she received an unexpected call.
“I got a call from her school and I’m thinking maybe she might be sick because I know the number," Moses said. "So, I answer the phone when I have my customer on hold and they tell me that they don’t know where my daughter went to."
Moses said minutes after the school notified her, school staff and a campus officer knocked on her door and told her they were on a search to find her daughter.
“'Where’s my child?' when they told me they don’t know, and it was multiple people telling me that it scared me," she said.
Nearly two hours later, her daughter Aaliyah was found at the Shadow Mountain Condominiums, which is about one mile from Jonas Salk Elementary School. To get to the condominiums, Aaliyah must have had to cross a four-lane road, near 61st Street and Memorial.
“Anything could have happened to my child, she could have got hit by a car, some weirdo could have picked her up, you know she could be on her way out of state right now if we did not locate my child," Moses said.
She said her daughter told her she was at recess when she left the school premises, but Moses said the school told her that staff had placed her in the hallway because she was disrupting class. She said they told her that's when she wandered off.
“She just stated that she was at recess and she wandered off and got lost,” Moses said.
We reached out to Tulsa Public Schools who responded with the following statement:
This morning, a third grade student at Salk Elementary intentionally left campus unescorted. Our school team immediately reviewed security camera footage and saw the child leave through one of the school’s exits. They notified Campus Police, called the child’s parents, and began to look for the child in the nearby neighborhood. Campus Police contacted the Tulsa Police Department for additional support. Officers found the child safe and reunited the child with their parents.
We want to thank our school team, Campus Police, and Tulsa Police who worked quickly to find this student. We want to remind our community that they can call our See.Hear.Share safety hotline at 918-480-SAFE, text 480SAFE, or email share@tulsaschools.org about concerns and tips.
However, Moses said she still wants to know how something like this could have happened.
“'I don’t know' is not good enough because my child is in the care of your hands while I’m at work,” she said.
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