By Stacia Glenn / The News Tribune
A reward for the safe return of a missing Bonney Lake teenager believed to have been kidnapped by a sex offender is up to $4,000.
Lileana “Lily” Christopherson, 15, was last seen by her mother in the early morning hours of May 9 at their home.
“Everybody believes she’s out there,” Damaris Kaufman, a family friend running a Facebook page to help find the girl, told King-5. “She just needs to know it’s safe to come home.”
Volunteer searchers are combing Tacoma and putting up posters since Christopherson was last spotted at a motel on South Hosmer Street.
“I think whoever is with her should probably realize that nobody is going to stop and it’s best to just let her go,” Lynn Tercero told Komo News. “You don’t give up hope until you know for sure, until you find her. Her mom is hopeful, so we all are too.”
Investigators cautioned possible vigilantes about not trying to take justice in their own hands.
Six people beat up a man they believed to be a suspect in Christopherson’s disappearance and then dumped him in Puyallup, police said.
The man suffered serious injuries and was taken to Good Samaritan Hospital.
Police say Christopherson is endangered.
An 18-year-old acquaintance told officers he and the girl hung out the day she went missing at the Federal Way Transit Center and met up with a man and woman.
The pair was later identified as Christopher Fitzpatrick, 39, and Maria Ann Counts, 29.
Both have been charged with first-degree kidnapping, promoting commercial sex abuse of a minor, providing drugs to a minor, possession of child pornography and two counts of third-degree child rape.
Fitzpatrick is being held on $2 million bail. Counts is jailed in lieu of $500,000 bail.
The acquaintance also told police they’d all used a synthetic hallucinogen and he overheard Fitzpatrick and Counts telling Christopherson she could get paid if she took photos at a hotel.
Messages on Counts’ phone indicate she and Fitzpatrick were promoting prostitution with the teen.
After being arrested at a Tumwater motel, Counts told police they’d been moving around because they knew people were looking for Christopherson.
The girl wasn’t found even after Fitzpatrick was arrested Saturday at a Lakewood home.
When police searched the apartment where the group hung out with the acquaintance, they found a shovel and zip-ties in the dining room but no sign of the girl.
After Fitzpatrick made his first court appearance Tuesday, he tried to kill himself in the Pierce County Jail.
He was taken to a hospital and is expected to recover, sheriff’s spokesman Ed Troyer said.
Fitzpatrick’s criminal history includes two prior convictions for failing to register as a sex offender, third-degree assault and felony harassment for sexually assaulting his then-wife. When police arrested him in that case, according to charging papers, they found him in a motel room having sex with a 16-year-old girl who appeared tied to a bed.
Searchers will be looking for Christopherson in Tenino Thursday.
Anyone with information about the girl’s whereabouts is asked to call 911 or the U.S. Marshals hot line at 206-370-8600.
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