Why would Karol Sanchez stage her kidnapping?

On a ride to New York from Philly, my iPhone's Amber Alert begins to chime, meaning everyone around me with an iPhone's alarms simultaneously join the jarring chorus, abruptly ending the blissful silence of the ride.

After tapping the alert to disappointing receive no additional information, I return to Instagram to see a grainy black and white video from a street surveillance camera. The video shows a young woman walking with her mother on the street, umbrellas up, minding their business when the young woman is suddenly grabbed by four men, two who snatched her and 2 in the front seats and thrown into a sedan, snatched from her mother in a residential Bronx neighborhood on Monday night.

This young woman is 16-year-old Karol Sanchez.

Part of me is angry that I received that Amber Alert over 12 hours following her kidnapping. Why weren't we all alerted sooner? Why weren't more people alerted to the literal snatching of this young woman? Why weren't more people in outrage about it? 

Maybe because attacks and disappearances like Karol's are all too common. According to Refinery29, "This is, unfortunately, following a string of recent attacks on young women in the New York area. The video from New York's 40th precinct, which was posted on Twitter, shows the men appear from out of nowhere, tackling Sanchez into the car and speeding off. When her mother tried to intervene and protect her daughter, the kidnappers also pushed her to the ground in the process, in a wild haze of events. It happened, quite literally, in a New York minute, a little past 11 pm on December 16."

Karol could have been any one of us, walking with a friend or family member believing the lie of safety in numbers, only to be literally ripped from the desperate grip of our friend to disappear into a car full of captors. And with over 64,000 Black Women and Girls missing that virtually no major networks are discussing, things seem so infuriating and bleak.

pic.twitter.com/TeHB5BUkxg

— NYPD 40th Precinct (@NYPD40Pct) December 17, 2019

So imagine my (and countless others) surprise when at around 2:30pm Karol Sanchez suddenly appeared, and turning herself into police whiles stunned people on the street gaped. Turns out that Karol confessed to staging the entire thing with the 4 men who carried out the whole thing. 

This is an on going story and I will update it as new details emerge.