Two underage lovebirds ran away from home, telling their parents: “We love you. See you when we’re grown up.” Fourteen-year-old Juliana Ribeiro and her 16-year-old sweetheart Marco Santos went missing last Friday.
Their notes to their parents said: “We have work, we’re not going to be hungry, don’t call the police”, and Marco is understood to have written: “Don’t sell my scooter, or my things. Sorry for what we’ve done, but we love you.”
With the heartbreaking bid for the freedom to be together splashed over the nation’s best-read tabloid, it wasn’t long before the duo was located.
Even with their cellphones switched off, pings were detected in Porto and Montemor-o-Velho, with authorities finally catching up with them in Nazaré.
The story centres on the fact that last October Juliana’s family emigrated to Switzerland.
Marco had wanted to go with her, explains Correio da Manhã, “but his parents would not let him”.
Last week however, Juliana returned to her former home town of Paredes, in the company of her mother Marlene, to “deal with personal matters”.
The pair were due to be in Portugal for a few days only, with the return trip to Switzerland booked for last Sunday. But the lovesick teens had different ideas.
They used the excuse of going to a party to effect their escape, leaving both sets of parents their touching farewell letters.
“I am suffering a lot,” Juliana’s mother told CM before her daughter was ‘found’, safe and well and unrepentant.
The paper explains that the youngsters stipulated 2019 as the date they would be returning, as that’s the time Juliana will have reached the ‘magic age’ of 18 - the so-called age of consent that covers sexual relationships and other ‘major life decisions’.
Now she is understood to have told her mother that she doesn’t want to return to Switzerland and she and Marco hope their families do not try to keep them apart.
Article by kind permission of http://portugalresident.com
