Reality Puts End to Cyberspace Escapade

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. —  Sarah Sanders had never driven farther from home than the local Wal-Mart. So why would the 15-year-old decide, one day this summer, to travel 1,000 miles to be with a boy she’d never met?

And why would the boy, 17-year-old Jeffery Greineder, set out on a 500-mile trek to meet her?

The answer for both runaways: a chance connection on the Internet that quickly turned intimate, a cyberspace bond that made a real-space road trip seem somehow reasonable.

Theirs is an unsettling story for any parent who worries about the overlap of two largely uncharted territories--the Internet and the teenage mind.

But it’s also a tale that could have ended much worse. A high-tech connection started them on their way, but Sarah and Jeffery were brought home again by old-fashioned safeguards: the kindness of strangers, some help beyond the call of duty from police, and the devotion of parents to keep their children safe.

It started one day in May, when Sarah was tapping away on the computer at her home in Camden, a small town in rural Arkansas, 100 miles south of Little Rock.

She was a good student, a well-behaved daughter, “the one we thought would never give us any trouble,” says her father, Randy Sanders, a weapons quality-control specialist for a Defense Department contractor.

Sarah played clarinet, xylophone and piano in the band at Camden Fairview High School, where she was a freshman. She was a youth group leader at Immanuel Baptist Church and a trusted baby-sitter in the neighborhood.

That day on the computer, Sarah was chatting online with friends when a stranger interrupted. It was Jeffery Greineder, and soon he and Sarah adjourned to a private chat room.

Jeffery seemed real nice, down to earth--a “genuine boy-next-door type guy,” Sarah recalls thinking. He lived near Lancaster, Pa., and was the son of a truck driver. He had some problems at home, she thought, but so did she.

They struck up an Internet friendship, augmented by phone calls.

“I wouldn’t call it dating, but it was a close friendship,” Sarah says. “I didn’t realize how serious we were until this happened.”

In July, Sarah had a fight with her parents. She speaks vaguely about disagreements over how a young woman should behave. Jeffery’s mother, Lisa Greineder, says she heard it was an argument over whether Sarah should stay in the school band.

Sarah turned to Jeffery for support, and this was their solution: They would meet halfway between Arkansas and Pennsylvania, at a roadside park near Lexington, Ky.

Jeffery left first, on Sunday, July 18. Staying with his grandmother while his mother and father were away on a truck-driving job to Ohio, he borrowed his grandmother’s yellow Chevette and headed west.

In West Virginia, about halfway to the rendezvous spot, Jeffery called Sarah collect to tell her he was running out of money. Then he continued on to Lexington.

Sarah left Monday morning. As she walked down the hallway from her bedroom, family pictures caught her eye.

“I looked back several times,” she says. “I stopped and stared at them for what seemed like a long time.”

And then she was out the door. With $60 in her pocket, earned from baby-sitting jobs, she got behind the wheel of the 1990 Acura Integra that her parents had bought for her to drive once she turned 16.

She had only a learner’s permit and wasn’t supposed to drive without an adult, but she wasn’t going to let that stop her.

In Little Rock, she picked up a lunch of chips and a Coke. Some 200 miles farther, somewhere in Tennessee, her left front tire went flat, and she replaced it with the spare, with help from a passing state trooper.

About 600 miles from home, just north of Knoxville, her spare tire went flat. With so much going wrong, she decided to abandon the plan of meeting Jeffery in Kentucky. She left the car and met up with a truck driver, whom she asked to drop her off near Jeffery’s home in Pennsylvania.

He did, driving through the night and preaching most of the way about how good Sarah had it at home. He dropped her off in Lancaster on Tuesday morning, and she walked to Jeffery’s house. No one was home, so she let herself in through a bedroom window. She took a shower, cleaned Jeffery’s room and fed the family’s cats.

By now, her parents were frantic. Sarah had left a note on her pillow when she left, promising to find a job, finish school and be happy. Don’t worry, she told her parents.

Sanders and his wife, Melodee, jumped into action. They contacted a family friend, Sgt. Glenn Sligh of the Arkansas State Police, who retrieved messages between Sarah and Jeffery on the family’s computer. In Sarah’s bedroom trash, there was also an envelope with Jeffery’s address.

The teens soon were rounded up. After she washed up at Jeffery’s house, Sarah called one of his friends, whose mother then called the Pennsylvania State Police. In Kentucky, meanwhile, authorities found Jeffery near Lexington.

Randy and Melodee Sanders made their own 1,000-mile trip to retrieve their daughter and planned to ask a family friend to pick up the abandoned car in Tennessee. Jeffery’s parents drove to Kentucky to get their son.

It was a happy ending, as runaways go. According to the National Runaway Switchboard, more than 1,200 kids run away every day. About 40% cross state lines.

“It could have turned out a lot worse,” Lisa Greineder says. “They could have both come home in body bags.”

Sarah’s parents are thankful for the authorities who put out an alert for both teens, even though running away is not a crime. They’re thankful for the trucker who preached to Sarah. They’re even thankful that Jeffery really was a teenager, which they couldn’t tell for certain from his Internet messages.

“We didn’t know if he was 17, or 57 and a predator,” Randy Sanders says.

But new worries cut through his sense of relief. The world has changed since he was a kid, and not for the better.

“When we got mad at our parents, we had bikes,” he says. “Now they have cars and the Internet and 10,000 other things. Even though they’re good kids, they start out in this stuff in a small, innocent way, and before they know it they’re in over their heads.”

The Greineders have disconnected their computer from the Internet. Melodee Sanders says their computer now has a password on it for Internet access.

Jeffery’s mother blames Sarah for taking advantage of Jeffery’s compassionate side.

“Our kid is a kid who would leave and help anybody else,” Lisa Greineder says. “He did it out of the kindness of his heart. She called and cried her eyes out.”

Neither teen wants to be photographed, and Lisa Greineder says Jeffery does not want to be interviewed.

“I think he’s learned a lesson,” Lisa Greineder says. “He says he’ll never trust anyone again. He doesn’t really say too much about her.”

Sarah looks back on her experience philosophically.

“I know how teenage girls are,” she says. “When those feelings are hurt, they usually react in strange ways but not drastic. I guess I just took it to the extreme.”

Sarah just started her sophomore year. She says she’s doing fine and notes that classmates are asking all about her adventure.

When she was in Jeffery’s home, she finally saw a picture of him. Now she sometimes wonders what it would be like to meet him face to face.

“In a way I want to,” she says, “but not really.”

All the parents are less ambivalent.

“There’s no chance in hell for these kids to ever meet,” Jeffery’s mother says.