Father of missing girl says PTV “not interested” in search effort

The relieved father of an intellectually disabled girl who went missing for some eight hours yesterday has slammed PTV for being slow to act.

Danny Fletcher’s 14-year-old daughter Tarra-Lea, who has the mental age of an 8-year-old, was finally found yesterday in Cranbourne around 5pm.

Mr Fletcher has told Neil Mitchell the search could have been been resolved much earlier had they been allowed access to the data attached to Tarra-Lea’s Myki card.

“What I want to say Neil, is my disappointment, we contacted Myki and Metro Trains, because she had been using her card they would be able to tell us where she’d been,” Mr Fletcher said.

“They said, ‘We can’t access the system for 24 hours’.

“They just did not seem interested.”

Metro has told 3AW Public Transport Victoria is the body which has authority over the information in question.

PTV sent 3AW Mornings the following statement.

PTV response:

“We are pleased that Tarra-Lea was safely reunited with her family.”

“PTV has an established process for assisting the police in situations involving missing persons. PTV did not receive an approach from Victoria Police in relation to this incident.”

METRO response:

“After being approached by Mr Fletcher, PTV call centre alerted our control centre who immediately issued an urgent missing persons alert to all their frontline staff including Authorised Officers and customer service staff.”

Click PLAY below to hear the full chat with Danny

Good news! Missing teenager Tarra-Lea Fletcher has been located safe and well. Thank you for the shares.

— Victoria Police (@VictoriaPolice) September 20, 2017