The mother of a 7-year-old Florida girl who was kidnapped and murdered thinks she knows what happened to the little girl who trusted everyone too much, no matter how often she was told about “stranger danger.”
“She just loved everyone. She was very trusting. She just trusted everyone and she just assumed that they wouldn’t hurt her,” Diena Thompson told TODAY’s Meredith Vieira Thursday from Jacksonville, Fla.
Thompson was speaking of her daughter, Somer, whose killer is still on the loose nearly a month after the girl was abducted while walking home from school.
“I think that’s exactly what happened. They lured her over and did what they did, and she fought back once she realized this was not a nice person,” Thompson continued.
Keeping public aware
Somer disappeared on Oct. 19. Her body was discovered two days later in a landfill in Georgia. Since then, local police and the FBI have received more than 3,000 tips but have not identified a suspect. Saturday on “America’s Most Wanted,” investigators released sketches of the pink tote and lunch box Somer was carrying in hopes that someone may have seen them somewhere.
Since Somer’s death, Thompson has fought to keep the case in the public eye so the killer can be tracked down while also caring for her other three children: Somer’s twin brother, Samuel, her older sister Abby, 10, and older brother, Andrew, 13.