HAVE YOU SEEN HER? A troubled 17-year-old Little Ferry girl who made headlines when she ran away two years ago has done it again — only this time her father said he’s concerned that she might be involved in serious trouble.
Noelle Forte was supposedly staying overnight at the home of a female friend in Garfield this weekend, her father, Frank Forte, told CLIFFVIEW PILOT this morning.
Noelle Forte
(ALL PHOTOS: Courtesy Frank Forte, Mary Makinajian)
“We thought they were having a sleepover on Saturday,” he said. “They were there a few hours before they took off. They said they were going to stay out for awhile, but they never came back.”
The 18-year-old friend has a criminal record, said Forte of Butler.
Noelle needs medication to control symptoms of psycho-effective disorder that include hallucinations.
“It’s going on well over 24 hours now,” Forte told CLIFFVIEW PILOT this morning, “so time is getting critical.”
Forte and his ex-wife, Mary Makinajian, adopted Noelle in Guatemala when she was 7 months old.
Two years ago, they turned to CLIFFVIEW PILOT after she ran away from St. Mary’s residential treatment center in Passaic for a second time in several months. She’d been been living with other girls who have similar conditions, her parents said.
“This isn’t a regular teenaged child who ran away,” her mother said at the time. “Her psychiatrist said she can only be off her meds for two days.
“She’ll start to hallucinate, see things, hear things, taste things,” Makinajian said. “She’ll feel like things are crawling on her, or that they’re in her head.”
Noelle previously spent a night in Manhattan, was taken into custody by the Port Authority police and was returned home before several stays at Bergen Regional Medical Center.
Her July 2013 disappearance ended after she and a friend saw fliers that her father had posted and distributed in Manhattan and New Jersey.
It turned out she’d been scraping by on the streets of Passaic and Paterson for several nights, her parents said.
