SEATTLE - A young woman found wandering on the streets of New York two weeks ago has been identified as an 18-year-old from Hansville.
Kitsap County Sheriff spokesperson Scott Wilson says 18-year-old Kacie Peterson was positively identified on Sunday.
A family friend filed a missing person's report on Oct. 2, after Peterson vanished from a Kitsap County home in Hansville. According to Wilson, Peterson was staying with a friend of her deceased mother when she disappeared.
Just seven days after she left Kitsap County , Peterson showed up outside a shelter in Times Square in New York CITY. According to detectives, the girl did not know her name, where she was from or anything about her family.
She told authorities "I want to know who I am, and what happened to me."
"She was disoriented and the citizens had told uniformed officers that she was actually in the fetal position. The officer at that time obtained medical attention," said Christopher Zimmerman of the New York Police Dept.
On October 23, missing persons detectives released a photo of Peterson, which, according to CNN, led to a phone tip from a woman in Maryland. Detectives contacted Kitsap County authorities and the family is now heading to New York to reunite with the 18-year-old.
Peterson's father, who lives in Colville in Northeast Washington, has been working with missing person's detectives.
According to Wilson, the father said Peterson vanished one other time and "she had been found lying down next to river or stream or along those lines. She couldn't remember name or who she was or where she was."
Earlier this summer the blonde haired, blue eyed girl moved from Colville to Hansville to live with the family friend. She enrolled in couple of classes at Kingston high school but school officials told authorities that she wasn't there long and didn't have many ties to the student body.
Kitsap detectives discovered that Peterson drained her bank account. Authorities still want to know how she ended up in New York City. Wilson says this is not a criminal matter.
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