Dozens of community and family members gathered at a prayer vigil over the weekend for the safe return of a 14-year-old girl who has been missing in Conway, Arkansas, for over 25 days.
Community members at the vigil on Saturday pleaded for more volunteers to join the search party for Tanvi Marupally.
Jenny Wallace, a search party organizer, said they are planning to canvas the city for more clues regarding her disappearance, KATV reported.
We are trying to go through every neighborhood and ask the people to look at their Ring doorbell cameras. It is very important for every bit of footage to be watched because we usually have 30 days before the cameras re-record over them or expire. We are coming up on that timeline.
The vigil was held on Saturday in hopes that Marupally would show up, as that was also the day she was scheduled to take her ACT college entrance exam.
Marupally was last seen by a surveillance camera on Jan. 17 walking past the school bus she usually takes to get home from Conway Junior High School.
Authorities and the teenager’s family believe she ran away from home after learning that they might be deported to India.
The girl reportedly learned that her father, Pavan Roy, could lose his job after his company, which is in the tech industry, laid off about 10% of its employees.
Pavan is currently staying in the United States on a working visa while his wife is on a dependent visa. If he were to lose his job, his family would only have 10 days to make travel arrangements back to India.
Pavan claimed that while speaking to their daughter about the situation, he told her not to panic.
I said… let you and your mom first go back to India, let me figure out what and how the system works out, get a proper job, and then call you back. [She said] ‘What, go back to India? Why should I go back to India? I’ve been here.’
After the girl went missing, her father said in a video appeal that there was nothing to worry about anymore as he had applied…
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