A Virginia man faces dozens of charges after a teenage girl from Milwaukee who was last seen in June 2022 was located nearly four years later and more than 700 miles away, the authorities said.
The man, Owen Lars Andersson, 37, faces charges in two states after prosecutors said he lured a child online starting when she was 12 and years later arranged to meet her in Chicago before holding her captive in Virginia.
Mr. Andersson was charged on July 24 in Milwaukee with kidnapping, child enticement and abduction, according to a criminal complaint filed by Milwaukee County prosecutors that does not identify the victim.
In Virginia, Mr. Andersson faces 55 charges of possession of child sexual material as well as charges of abduction, strangulation, preventing a phone call and child endangerment, Patrick Jensen, acting commonwealth’s attorney in Montgomery County, said in a statement.
A lawyer for Mr. Andersson did not return a request for comment on Saturday. Mr. Andersson was being held without bail at Western Virginia Regional Jail, Mr. Jensen said.
The missing teenager was located on May 25 in Virginia, according to the Milwaukee police.
Lt. S.P. Chuyka, of the Blacksburg Police Department in Virginia, said in a statement that the police went to an area home on May 23 in response to a call about a domestic dispute.
Officers transported the person who called to a local resource center and “further investigation into this incident led officers to discover that the reporting party was reported missing as a juvenile out of Wisconsin,” Lieutenant Chuyka said.
The victim said she was held against her will and physically and sexually abused by Mr. Andersson for years, according to Milwaukee County prosecutors.
The Blacksburg police returned to the house with a search warrant, Lieutenant Chuyka said.
When the police arrested Mr. Andersson, he was found with two pistols, more than a dozen loaded magazines, knives and cans of pepper spray, according to prosecutors.
Douglas Feuerbach, 76, a neighbor, said Mr. Andersson’s arrest prompted a large police response that blocked off the road around the single-family house that Mr. Andersson rented, which is about a mile from Virginia Tech.
Mr. Feuerbach said he sometimes saw a young woman by herself wandering the home’s sprawling backyard.
Mr. Feuerbach said he once spoke with a man there. He assumed the man, who told Mr. Feuerbach that he worked for a government agency and asked him not to walk across the property line, was the young woman’s father.
“One of the things he volunteered to say was that he was sufficiently trained in self-defense,” Mr. Feuerbach said. “It was a ‘don’t mess with me’ kind of thing.”
Prosecutors said the teenager was not allowed to attend school during her captivity.
Mr. Andersson had rented the house since at least June 2023, Brigitte Kraemer Rotche, the property owner, said in a text message.
Milwaukee prosecutors said Mr. Andersson had communicated with the victim since she was 12 years old through Kik, Discord and Signal messages, sexually exploiting her and promising a supportive home if she ran away.
The girl left her Milwaukee home on June 23, 2022, following instructions from Mr. Andersson, who had her purchase a burner phone with cash and arranged to take her to Chicago, according to prosecutors.
They met outside a Chicago movie theater, where Mr. Andersson had her reset her iPhone to its factory settings, erasing its data, before dumping both phones in a trash can, according to the criminal complaint.
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
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