The 16-year-old girl who was found in a North Berkeley neighborhood naked and screaming for help may have been kidnapped in San Francisco.
Officer Gordon Shyy confirmed news reports that the San Francisco Police Department has taken over the case as the lead investigators, presumably because the original crime occurred in San Francisco.
SFPD told KTVU that investigators received the case Thursday morning. However, they've not interviewed the teen yet.
Police will be investigating the case as an alleged kidnapping and robbery -- not a sexual assault.
The teen was found naked and pepper sprayed at about 5 a.m. on Wednesday at the intersection of Piedmont and Ashby -- an upscale neighborhood where crimes like these are out of the ordinary; she told authorities that she had been raped.
The victim told police she had been kidnapped and robbed in Oakland and dropped off in Berkeley, but then changed her story, leading the cops to believe she was abducted in San Francisco.
Yesterday, Oakland police said they believed the girl might have been a victim of sex trafficking. However, Shyy tells SF Weekly that they're not investigating it as a sexual assault because they "don't have information about a sexual assault" at this time.
"We don't have too much: she made some accounts that she was forced into a vehicle here in San Francisco and taken to the East Bay where she was robbed and dropped off in street there in Berkeley," Shyy tells us. "As far as the sex assault, we just don't have an account of that, so we're not investigating it as a sexual assault at this time."
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