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OGDEN — It's difficult to say exactly how many kids run away from home, but statistics from the National Runaway Safeline put the number around one and a half million runaways in the United States every year.
Here in Utah, more than 2,000 runaway cases have been reported so far in 2013. KSL News surveyed a dozen of the largest police agencies in the state, and here's a sampling of what we found:
- In St. George, nearly 90 runaways were reported in 2013.
- In Orem, Tooele and Ogden, the number of runaways for 2013 roughly 115 for each city.
- Salt Lake City and West Valley City each reported close to 300 runaways in 2013.
- The Unified Police Department, which covers about a dozen communities, reported nearly 700 runaway cases in 2013.
Those numbers hit close to home for a teenager from Ogden. When she was 14 years old, Sonia Rivas decided that life on the street was a better place to be than home or a detention center. She ran away from home with an older man after a big fight with her dad.
"We stayed in cars, we stayed in hotels," Sonia said. "If he couldn't afford it, his friends had a place and we'd go stay there."
"Of course I was scared. I was just a kid," she said. "We were around different people who were in gangs and doing drugs and just running in the streets, so of course I felt in danger, being a young girl around all these grown men."
Sonia said she learned to steal and had her first experience with drugs. She said she was never involved in prostitution, but her sister Myriah said she knew other runaways who were.
"‘The dope man', or whatever you want to call him — the guy who sells it — (another girl) used to sleep with him for drugs and stuff," Myriah said.
For two months, the only thing Sonia cared about was not getting caught.
"I just felt myself going down," she said. "I just felt like I couldn't be there anymore."
She eventually called her dad. He and Myriah drove to Brigham City at 3 a.m., no questions asked.
"What did I say to her?" Myriah said. "I didn't say anything to her. All I could do was hold her."
Three years later, Sonia has this advice for other teens thinking about running away: "Think about your options fully. If I would have done that then, I never would have run away."
Email: tmashburn@ksl.com
