Michele Sorrano's message is loud and clear: Whatever caused her 14-year-old daughter, Alyssa Michele Mizuki, to run away is no match for a mother's love.
Alyssa, a student at Washington Irving Middle School, was last seen on the morning of Tuesday, Feb. 7. When she didn't come home after school that day, Sorrano said she called the school to see if Alyssa was staying after school. She was told that she had skipped her last three classes.
"There was some activity on her MySpace page on Feb. 12, the day we had that snowstorm, and the police took the records and tracked it down to a computer at a church near here," Sorrano said. "She told people at the church she was locked out of her house. She went on the computer and made a ton of phone calls, then they dropped her off in Arlington."
Sorrano said Alyssa's father has been "plastering her poster everywhere" each Saturday afternoon for the past month, hoping to get some new information.
At two locations in the Bailey's Crossroads area, a Wendy's and the City Diner, employees told Roy Mizuki his daughter looked familiar, Sorrano said.
She thinks her daughter's disappearance may be gang related, based on phone calls from a vice principal at Irving who was concerned that Alyssa was involved in MS-13 based on notes she'd written and drawings on her notebooks, Sorrano said.
"It doesn't matter what's going on, I just want her to come home," she said. "I always told Lis that I'd have her back. I just want her to come home."
ALYSSA IS CONSIDERED a runaway, not the victim of a kidnapping, said Fairfax County Police spokeswoman Mary Mulrenan. "She has had sporadic contact with her friends, but that only shapes the case a little."
There has been no evidence to suggest Alyssa's involvement with a gang, Mulrenan said, or that she had been taken against her will.
In 2004, 1,452 children were reported missing in Fairfax County, Mulrenan said. Nearly all of those cases, 1,325 in total, have been closed. So far in 2006, 200 children have been reported missing; all but four cases have been closed.
A poster issued by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children lists Alyssa as being 5 feet, 1 inch tall, weighing about 125 pounds, brown hair, hazel eyes, with braces on her teeth. She has a scar on the right side of her chin and one from her ear down her jaw line on the left side of her face.
Anyone with any information is asked to call Fairfax County Police at 703-691-2131 or 1-800-THE-LOST (843-5678).