UPDATE: Missing Teacher and Teen Found in West Virginia Super 8 Motel! - Okay who had WV in the pool? No one? Well at least it's on the way to Orlando, Florida where we predicted they would end up, so we get half a point on this one. At right, Lisa Lavoie's mug shot picture. She's now listed as being 24 for some reason.
Massachusetts schoolteacher Lisa Lavoie is behind bars on a kidnapping charge in West Virginia today after police found her at a motel with a 15-year-old boy whose parents had complained about the relationship.
Lavoie, 24, appeared before a Monongalia County magistrate by videoconference from the North Central Regional Jail near Flatwoods, in central West Virginia. She was ordered held without bond because kidnapping in West Virginia carries a possible life sentence, said State Police Cpl. T.W. Goodnight.
In Massachusetts, she faces a charge of enticing a child under 16, and authorities in West Virginia plan to charge her as a fugitive from justice, Goodnight said. Michael Sullivan, mayor of Holyoke, Mass., said the enticement charge includes statutory rape. Lavoie will likely be released to Massachusetts authorities, but those details have not been worked out.
Authorities had been tracking the teacher and boy for several days through credit card and cell phone use, Sullivan said. On Monday night, state police were informed she was at the Super 8 Motel in a Morgantown shopping center just off Interstate 68. A motel manager declined comment, but Goodnight said the staff had been in contact with Massachusetts authorities before his team arrived this morning. After confirming a vehicle in the parking lot belonged to Lavoie, troopers got a passkey and went to her room.
The door was deadbolted, and officers tried to kick it in before Lavoie and the boy opened it, Goodnight said. Lavoie surrendered quietly.
EARLIER: Is 15 too old to be in elementary school? Apparently not at Maurice A. Donahue Elementary School in Holyoke, MA, where an eighth grade boy has--according to police--allegedly run off with his female teacher, 22.
Cops say that the parents of the boy came to them more than a week ago to file a missing persons report and asked them to interview Lisa Lavoie, the teen's teacher at the school. But now Lavoie is also missing and now HER parents have also filed a police report. It didn't take the boys at CSI: Holyoke to conclude that the pair has likely run off together . . . the question is where? The Canadian boarder is closer, but Mexico, despite the current unrest there, always seems to have an allure for runaway teens and their adult lovers.
Next on the list is usually Las Vegas, although it's harder to get work there now. Our bet is on Florida, likely the Orlando area near the theme parks.
We'd like to post pictures of the missing couple so that our readers could help in the search, but so far the cops--for some unknown reason--are refusing to release them. Hogging all the glory of the capture for yourself officers? If you think you've seen them, please contact the FBI or the Holyoke Police Department. (
CBS 3 Springfield)
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