The 16 year old who walked out of her Golden Gate Estates home on July 31 has been found safe in New Jersey, the Collier County Sheriff's Office has confirmed, and her father says the call reached him about four o'clock on Monday afternoon

The 16 year old girl who had been missing from Golden Gate Estates since the last day of July has been found safe in New Jersey.

Gulf Coast News, reporting on Monday evening under the byline of James Curtis, said Sophia Veronica Cover was found in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, eleven days after she left her family's home in Collier County on foot at about 12.45 a.m. on July 31. The outlet reported that the Collier County Sheriff's Office confirmed she has been found and that she is safe.

Her father, Richard Cover, told Gulf Coast News that the news reached him from the sheriff's office about 4 p.m. on Monday, and that he was told federal agents located her. He said she had been staying with friends. He described her in a video shared on social media as found safe, and said he plans to fly to New Jersey early on Wednesday to bring her home. He told the outlet he is still waiting on the Department of Children and Families for details of how she travelled and when she can come back.

The family moved to Southwest Florida from the New Jersey and Philadelphia area earlier this year. That detail sat in the record from the first week of the search, when her father said he had contacted friends of hers in that area without finding anyone who had heard from her.

The state record has not caught up. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement carries Sophia Cover in its Missing Endangered Persons Information Clearinghouse as record 519694, a missing child in the runaway category, missing since July 31, from Naples in Collier County. This desk read that flyer directly twice in the early hours of Tuesday, at 1.26 a.m. and again at 1.32 a.m. Eastern. Both reads returned the same page, unchanged, still listing her as missing. Clearinghouse flyers are withdrawn by the state after a case closes rather than the moment an agency locates someone, and a copy of that flyer circulating now is not a sign that anything has changed.

The runaway category on the state record is a classification recorded by the reporting agency. It was that from the first day, this brief did not treat it as a finding then, and it does not now. Nobody has been accused of anything in this case, no agency has named anyone, and what happened over the eleven days is not something any document available to this desk sets out.

This desk covered the case on August 6, at day six, when the sheriff's office had described a multi agency investigation with no leads and the newly added clothing description on the state flyer was the only thing that had moved.

Anyone who was working from the old flyer can stop. The tip lines published during the search, the Collier County Sheriff's Office on 239-252-9300 and the state clearinghouse on 1-888-356-4774, remain the correct numbers for other cases.