BRATTLEBORO — Opal Robinson, 15, away from home for a week and missing for days, made contact with relatives on Oct. 23 and has returned to Brattleboro.
“All I know is that she's alive and OK,” her mother, Liz Robinson, said that evening, the relief in her voice palpable.
Robinson and her husband, Trevor, had been staying close to home, wary about leaving for fear of missing news about their daughter.
The last anyone saw Opal Robinson was when she left a friend's house in Springfield, Mass. in a car “with somebody nobody knows,” her father said several hours before she made contact, as the family desperately sought information.
From Brattleboro to Springfield
With her parents' permission, Opal, a 15-year-old ninth grader at Brattleboro Union High School, had gone to a party in town on the night of Friday, Oct. 16 and was expected home the next morning.
She ended up in Springfield, Mass., where she called her parents from that location the next day, and Robinson said he grudgingly gave her permission to spend another night there.
By Sunday afternoon, she called a relative. Around that time, friends saw her get into an unfamiliar car. After that, all of her social media activity ceased, and the Robinsons contacted the Brattleboro Police Department.
Lt. Mike Carrier of the Brattleboro Police Department's Criminal Investigation Division led the investigation locally. On Oct. 24, the department issued a press release thanking “everyone who helped in locating and assisting in her return.”
“This is still considered to be an active investigation in determining if individual(s) assisted in harboring the juvenile,” the release continued.
'An incredibly smart, funny kid'
While Opal was still missing, Trevor Robinson described her as “an incredibly smart, funny kid,” one who consistently made the honor roll at Brattleboro Area Middle School, but one who was also struggling with new issues and bullying as she was nursing the hurt from her breakup with her girlfriend over the summer.
He said his daughter would “self-advocate” as needed, seeking help academically and socially anytime she needed it.
With Liz contributing additional superlatives in the background, Trevor Robinson enumerated his daughter's creative talents: singing, writing, painting, drawing.
He also described Opal as someone who realized all these creative accomplishments on her own.
“The Young Writers Project has audio of her reading her poems,” her father said.
One click of that link streams the voice of an eighth-grade Opal Robinson reading a poem, “I stopped writing my poems,” from a reading a full year ago at the Brattleboro Literary Festival.
“I stopped writing my poems,” she said, her clear and confident voice reaching through time. “My pages are blank./I don't know who I am./I don't know where I went.”