AirTag provides clues as woman finally reunites with missing 12-year-old sister

A Brooklyn preteen has been found safe days after running away from home, thanks in small part to an Apple AirTag attached to her keys.

On the afternoon of April 9, Eliana Perozo monitored the AirTag on the keychain of younger sister Victorious "Tori" Perozo. According to the AirTag activity, 12-year-old Tori left the Baccalaureate School for Global Education in Queens at the appropriate time and hopped on the correct subway train to return to her home in Prospect Lefferts Gardens in Brooklyn.

However, Eliana, Tori's legal guardian, began to worry when the AirTag indicated Tori took a surprise turn and started heading in the wrong direction. "Once she hit the city, I saw her AirTag go up towards the Bronx instead of down towards Brooklyn," Eliana previously stated. "That’s when I knew that she was at least going somewhere she wasn’t supposed to be going."

Eliana then alerted a friend that Tori had gone missing, and the two women began tracking the movements indicated on the AirTag. The last location where the AirTag pinged was an apartment near St. Ann's Ave and 134th St. in the Bronx, nearly 15 miles north of Eliana and Tori's neighborhood. Unfortunately, the ping turned out to be a dead end as a man living in the apartment had found the AirTag on the street and brought it home with him. He never saw Tori, he claimed.

For days, Eliana, her friend, and nearly 30 others continued to search. Eliana had become Tori's legal guardian because their mother has been chronically absent in their lives. According to Eliana, their mother has not made contact with her daughters in at least two months.

The night before Tori went missing, Eliana had caught Tori texting an older boy and swapped out the girl's smartphone for a flip phone, a punishment that seemed to anger Tori. While Tori remained missing, she never once answered her phone.

"I think she’s a 12-year-old who survived a lot of loss," Eliana explained to reporters at the time. "And there’s so much support and mental health services and people that love her and support her — but I feel that’s not the case in her 12-year-old mind, so she ran away."

Luckily, dogged detectives with the NYPD spotted Tori on surveillance footage at a subway station in the East Village. The timestamp on the surveillance footage when Tori appeared was about 5:45 a.m. on Thursday, but police didn't see her on the footage until sometime on Friday.

When officers finally found the girl is unclear, but she was reunited with Eliana on Sunday — five days after she first ran away.

The New York Post reached out to Eliana for comment after Tori was found but did not receive a response.

"She’s a really great kid," Eliana said previously.

"I don’t want this moment to be a defining moment in her life."

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