Politics
We were accused of a GoFundMe scam but were only looking to find our missing daughter, says Lateche Norris’ mom
THE mom of a missing TikToker has faced a barrage of harassment on Twitter since finding her daughter and fended off accusations that it was part of a money-grabbing scheme.
Cheryl Walker and her husband flew from Indiana to San Diego to look for her 20-year-old daughter Lateche Norris after she went missing in early November and set up a GoFundMe.
Lateche Norris/FacebookLateche Norris was missing for a month[/caption]
Cheryl Walker and her daughter Lateche Norris were reunited after the 20-year-old went missing in San Diego in early NovemberCheryl Walker/Facebook
CBS News 8Mom Cheryl said they have faced trolls on social media[/caption]
The donations would help pay for plane tickets, transportation, food, and hotels while they scoured San Diego and the areas surrounding the city for Lateche, Walker said.
“I thought the worst had happened to her,” Walker told The Sun in an exclusive interview Friday, a little less than a week after Lateche was found unharmed.
She was with her boyfriend Joey Smith, who had been in and out of rehab, when she called her mom from a stranger’s phone on November 5, and then neither were heard from nor seen again until last weekend.
“I thought he hurt her, or something happened to him and she was out there alone,” Walker said. “All I wanted to do was find my baby.”
That moment of relief came around 11:40 p.m. Saturday when Lateche got in contact with her mom after seeing one of the posters.
They were reunited within a couple of hours, and they found out Lateche and her boyfriend were living on the streets in a makeshift encampment that he set up for them.
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The next day, Walker said she updated the GoFundMe to say Lateche was found. Police were already alerted.
For weeks, Lateche’s missing person case captured national headlines on the heels of the tragic Gabby Petito saga and included the support from Gabby’s family.
About 24 hours after being reunited with Lateche, Walker said: “she wanted to do the right thing” and say her daughter’s boyfriend didn’t hurt her and slammed comparisons to Brian Laundrie.
Laundrie was a person of interest in Gabby’s death before he was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
That’s when Twitter users attacked Walker and her family. Some said they made it up to bilk money from sympathetic people for a vacation.
There were other rumors that they partying with booze the night Lateche was found.
“None of it is true,” Walker told The Sun. “I wasn’t thinking about anything but finding Lateche. It wasn’t a hoax. It wasn’t a scam. I didn’t know what happened to my daughter.”
Others dug up Lateche and Walker’s son’s pasts when they were abused, Walker said.
“It was horrendous,” she said. “After seeing all this, my daughter just wanted to crawl in a hole and die.”
Walker said they had been stranded in San Diego and needed to borrow money for plane tickets back to Indiana.
‘MONEY WAS TIGHT’
Walker set up a GoFundMe to raise money for plane tickets to San Diego, transportation, food, and hotels.
She said her family was already tight on money because she left her job to be a full-time caregiver for her mom, who ultimately died in a hospice over the summer.
And before her death, Walker said her mom was a victim of a scam.
“Money was tight. We went from a two-income household to one. The mortgage on my mom’s house was behind. And a few months later, my daughter went missing,” she said.
GOFUNDME RESPONDS
In an emailed statement to The Sun, a spokesperson for GoFundMe said they’re looking into Walker’s donation page.
“I can confirm that our Trust & Safety team is in touch with fundraiser organizer Cheryl Walker and the review of this fundraiser is ongoing,” it said.
“If any donor would like to request a refund in the meantime, we will process it for them.
“Our Trust & Safety team is committed to monitoring activity on and off the platform to ensure compliance with our Terms of Service. Outcomes can range from placing a hold on a fundraiser, pending further review, to outright removal — and in some cases even banning a user for their misuse of our platform.”
POLICE CLASSIFIED LATECHE AS ‘AT-RISK’
Walker said she felt she had to go to San Diego because she felt the police weren’t doing enough to find Lateche.
About three weeks after she was last seen in a 7-11, San Diego police updated her status to an “at-risk” missing person because of the mysterious circumstances around her disappearance but said there’s no evidence of a crime.
CBS News 8Lateche and her boyfriend Joey Smith said they had been living on the streets[/caption]
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