Texas teen fakes ID so well she’s deported to Colombia
U.S. federal officials are trying to figure out how a runaway teenager in Texas used an assumed identity so convincingly that she ended up being deported to Colombia.
Jakadrien Larise Turner, who is now 15, apparently reinvented herself as Tika Lanay Cortez, a 21-year-old illegal migrant from Bogota, when she was arrested in Houston last year on a theft charge.
In the weeks that followed, everyone who dealt with her — from the lawyer at her trial to the Colombian diplomat who met her before deportation — never suspected she was anyone else than who she was claiming to be.
“At no time during these criminal proceedings was her identity determined to be false,” a spokeswoman for the immigration and Customs Enforcement agency said.
She said the agency — the branch of the Department of Homeland Security that polices U.S. borders — was “fully and immediately investigating this matter in order to expeditiously determine the facts of this case.”
Turner, who apparently speaks no Spanish, ran away from her Dallas area home in 2010 when her parents were getting a divorce, her grandmother Lorene Turner said.
“How do you deport a teenager and send her to Colombia without a passport, without anything?” she asked, implying that law enforcement agencies had failed to thoroughly verify the teenager’s identity.
She said she had spent hours trawling through social networking sites until she discovered through Facebook that her granddaughter was in Colombia, going by the names of Tika Solo too long and Tika Confero.
WFAA reported that Turner is now in a detention facility, where Colombian authorities are refusing to release her, a month after the U.S. Embassy in Bogota asked police to pick her up. No reason for her detention was given.
Turner’s last wall post on Facebook, in mid-november, claimed that she was “in a relationship with same man I broke up with . . . he show me that he is serious with me, an so on, so ok lol!!!!!”