Sheriff: Macon teen who ran away spent 3 ‘freezing’ nights huddled in tarp to stay warm
Speculation surrounding the Saturday-night disappearance of a 17-year-old Macon girl has run the gamut in recent days as authorities scoured the Monroe County countryside for any sign of her.
Some suggested the teen had been abducted. Others feared she was lost in the forests that enshroud subdivisions to the south of Bolingbroke along U.S. 41 between Interstate 75 and the northern junction with its bypass, I-475.
But in the end, law enforcement officials say, Jorja Etheridge had run away and hidden.
She bolted from a neighborhood where she was to have spent the night Saturday, and, for the next two and a half days, holed up in a shed roughly a mile away. She huddled in a tarp to stay warm during parts of three nights that saw temperatures dip into the 20s.
Why Etheridge ran away was not entirely clear, but officials have said she apparently fled into the night after attending a party and then arriving at the sleepover spot later than she was supposed to.
Monroe Sheriff Brad Freeman said Etheridge’s curfew was 11:30 p.m., a time she was supposed to be back at the sleepover on North Rivoli Farms Road, a mile or two from Bolingbroke. When her parents couldn’t reach her by phone late Saturday, they grew concerned, Freeman said, and went to check on her at the sleepover.
By then it was going on 12:30 a.m., the wee hours of Sunday.
About then, upon returning from the party by car with a friend, Etheridge learned that her parents’ car was parked at the sleepover house.
On foot, she took off — possibly out of fear of being in trouble. She left her cellphone behind.
Etheridge, a Tattnall Square Academy student, has since told sheriff’s officials that she ducked into some woods nearby and crossed U.S. 41 and the rail line that parallels it, slipping unseen into a neighborhood known as Loraine Woods half a mile or so to the south.
The area lies about a mile northwest of Bibb County’s Howard High School.
There Etheridge apparently took cover in a shed by a garage at a house. A woman who lives there had been out of town until Tuesday. The woman returned home and happened to spot the teen poking her head out of the shed about noon.
The woman, aware of the all-out search to find Etheridge, called out to the teen by name.
“You need to stop this,” the woman said.
“Yeah, you’re right,” the teen reportedly replied.
The woman dialed 911 and within seven minutes, a sheriff’s deputy was on the scene. The search for Etheridge was over.
Freeman, the sheriff, said Etheridge, who was dehydrated, was taken to a local hospital to recover from being out in the elements.
He said that she had used a tarp she had found as she “hunkered down” in the shed.
“She was still freezing cold,” the sheriff said.
“And she stayed there (at the shed) for the duration.”
Without a phone and no contact with the outside world, Etheridge apparently did not know the lengths authorities had gone to in looking for her. They had summoned a state patrol helicopter with thermal-imaging technology and also organized searches to scoured the surrounding woodlands.
Freeman said Etheridge has said she heard the helicopter but had not known it was searching for her.
He also said the teen could not have foreseen the undertaking that unfolded to find her.
“She had no idea of the effort we put into this. None,” the sheriff said. “I’m just glad there was a happy ending.”