When 13-year-old Jordan Marie Aaron went missing from her Georgia home in early May, the story made headlines in the local Covington News: “Investigators search for missing teen.” The middle school girl ”was last seen at 9 p.m. Wednesday night [May 1]. When her parent went to wake her up around 6 a.m. Thursday, the teen wasn’t in her bed. … Her makeup and hair products were also missing,” the newspaper reported, quoting a Newton County Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman: “We need to know where she is. Right now our main concern is finding out where this little girl is and making sure she is safe and that no one is harming her.” A photo showed the chubby brunette (described as 5-foot-4, 150 pounds) smiling in front of gift-wrapped packages beneath the family Christmas tree.
In May, the Covington News reported the case of runaway 13-year-old Jordan Aaron.
She was still missing two weeks later, when her mother told the local newspaper about the night her daughter disappeared:
Kimberly Snyder, Jordan’s mother … said Jordan was getting ready for bed and that the family had spent an uneventful night together. Snyder remembered that her daughter unloaded the dishwasher – one of her chores — and that Jordan gave her a hug and told her that she loved her. …
Rumors around Cousins Middle School, where Jordan attended school, are that she was planning to leave with an older boyfriend. However, according to Snyder, Jordan didn’t have a boyfriend, and if she did, it wasn’t someone she had ever met in person and was an online-only situation.
“We monitored her activities on the internet,” said Snyder. “If her grades dropped, her T.V. was taken away — typical discipline for a 13-year-old. I wasn’t a mother who would drop her off at the skating rink and leave; she didn’t go spend the night with friends unless we knew the parents. We thought we were doing everything we could, that’s the reason this came as a shock. …”
The teenager from Newton County, about 35 miles east of Atlanta, remained missing for more than a month. Subsequent reports included the information that she was active on the Internet, using social media sites including Facebook. A listing by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children said Jordan was known to use an online alias, “Krystal Lee Rhoades.”
Jordan was found earlier this month at a home on a cul-de-sac in an upscale neighborhood in the Atlanta suburb of Marietta. Authorities in Cobb County say the teenager had been secretly living in the basement bedroom of Kennesaw State University student Joshua Harry Measroch, 21.
Missing poster for Jordan Aaron (left); police mug shot of Joshua Measroch (right).
Measroch met the girl through an online dating site, police said, and “drove 50 miles to the girl’s home and picked her up without the permission of her parents,” the Marietta Daily Journal reported. Police say Measroch, who graduated from prestigious Walton High School in 2011, kept the runaway in hidden in his bedroom at the home where he lived with his parents. Measroch had sex with the girl several times before he was taken into custody June 5, officials said.
Measroch first made contact with the girl earlier this year through an Internet dating site, authorities said, and the two had been communicating online for about three months before Aaron went missing in May. “She was misrepresenting herself using different names, ages, aliases and making multiple social network profiles,” Newton County Sheriff’s Deputy Cortney Morrison told the Marietta paper.
Measroch was charged June 13 with four felonies — rape, aggravated child molestation, child molestation and enticing a child for indecent purpose — and a misdemeanor charge of interference with custody. The girl’s parents were “instrumental” in helping law enforcement find their missing daughter, Deputy Morrison said. Investigation of the case is continuing, she said, and both Measroch and the girl are cooperating with authorities.
Online information shows the Measroch family’s 4-bedroom, 4-bath home on Powers Park Way is valued at more than $400,000. The home on a tree-shaded cul-de-sac near Johnson Ferry Road is about a mile from the Chattahoochee River. More than 80 percent of students at Walton High School, where Joshua Measroch graduated two years ago, exceed statewide academic standards. Officials at Kennesaw State University say Measroch had taken courses in communications and sports management at the university.
A neighbor told the Marietta newspaper he “never had any problems” with Joshua Measroch and said the accused sex offender’s family “seem like very nice people to me.”
READ MORE:
Megan Thornton, Marietta Daily Journal: Neighbor: ‘Nice people’ live at home of student accused of hiding teen
Barbara Knowles, Newton Citizen: 13-year-old Covington runaway found safe
Marietta Daily Journal: East Cobb man jailed on suspicion of molesting teenager, keeping her in his home more than a month