Turhan, who was anxiously awaiting word on his missing 16-year- old daughter, Aylin, thought the person had the wrong number, lost his patience, and quickly hung up.

Several hours later, he would finally make the connection, albeit not on his own. Police from Longview, Texas, called, saying they had found Aylin riding an Amtrak train from Los Angeles to New York. She had been asked for her home number when she bought the ticket.

"We had no idea what they Amtrak were calling about and we wanted to keep the line open," Nesrin Turhan, Aylin's mother, said Wednesday.

"We had been so overwhelmed with our missing daughter that we never put it together."

Thus ended one of the longest and most bizarre missing-persons investigations this community has seen in years, police said.

Sources close to the investigation said Wednesday that Aylin had told friends as long as a year ago that she wanted to go on a cross- country trip. "The information that we were getting was that she had probably run away," said one source. "There were flags that pointed to this." She surprised most everyone when she walked off the campus of Wayne Hills High School around 7:30 a.m. April 4, and vanished.

In the following days, dozens of officers and search dogs combed the area around the high school and the woods surrounding the nearby Point View Reservoir. Detectives and school officials interviewed friends and classmates.

Police suspect Aylin took the train to the West Coast the trip that would have prompted the Amtrak courtesy call to the Turhan residence and was heading home.

Police said she paid cash for her ticket. Her family said they noticed she had been saving her lunch money and allowance and said she didn't have access to a credit card.

Aylin spent Tuesday night at a youth shelter in Longview, about 145 miles east of Dallas and 40 miles from the Louisiana border, police said. Ibrahim Turhan left for Texas on a 5:15 a.m. flight Wednesday and was scheduled to bring his daughter home this afternoon. Wayne police said they would question her either today or Friday.

Family members from all over the world called the Turhans house on Ratzer Road on Wednesday and breathed a sigh of relief when they got the news.

"It was a terrible, terrible time," said Nesrin Turhan. "I can't imagine anything worse than what we had been going through."

Turhan said the family took trips to their native Turkey and to Europe at least once a year, so traveling was nothing new to her daughter.

"I knew that she could take care of herself," she said. "She has always said she wanted to go somewhere far on a train. I didn't think she would do it like this."

Family members said Wednesday that police even confiscated the family computer to see if she had any contact with someone in an Internet chat room, but found nothing. "She did all this by herself," her mother said.

Aylin was found Tuesday evening by two undercover Longview police officers who routinely patrol Amtrak trains as part of a drug- interdiction program. She was found alone and unharmed.

"One of the things they look at is suspicious people," said Chief A.J. Key of the Longview police. "A young girl traveling by herself is pretty suspicious, so they went up to her. She had her home phone number on the ticket so they called her parents from the train." Wayne Hills Principal Eugene Sudol said he has already set up counseling for Aylin to help her make the transition back to school.

"Now's the hard part," the mother said. "We have to find out why she did this, why she went so far away from us. We have to see if we should go to counseling or not. My concern now is what can we do for her."

Publication date: 2000-04-13