Alicia Navarro argued with man, yelled ‘I will go back’ just one day before return: neighbor
The 18-year-old girl who went missing from Arizona in 2019 and re-emerged in Montana this week allegedly fought with the man she was living with and threatened to “go back” — just one day before she turned herself in at a police station.
Neighbors told The Post they heard a holed-up Alicia Navarro Saturday shouting with an unidentified man inside their apartment building in Havre, a city roughly 40 miles from the Canadian border.
“I was here the other day and I heard them yelling. She did say, ‘I will go back.’ But that’s all I heard,” neighbor Garrett Smith, 22, told The Post.
“It was the day before she turned herself in.”
Navarro sauntered into a local police precinct the following day to request that she be taken off the missing person’s list so she could get a driver’s license and could begin living a “normal life,” according to authorities.
She had been missing since police said she “willfully left her home” in Glendale, Arizona home in 2019.
It’s not clear how long Navarro has been living in the Havre apartment, but Smith said she and a man in his 20s have been residents since he moved in about a year ago.
Smith also said he spoke to Navarro for the first time when she claimed she was “looking for her uncle” near a post office — only days before she went to the police station.
“She was asking for directions. She looked scared,” he said, adding that it was clear she didn’t know her way around the area.
“She said she was walking with her uncle and got lost and she’s looking for 6th Street,” Smith said. “I later found out that she was referring to him as her uncle.”
Smith’s girlfriend, Megan Alexander, 23, said they watched Navarro go into a “random house” and figured she had found someone who could help her.
Navarro called Smith “mister,” which the 22-year-old man found odd because he noticed she wasn’t very much younger.
He said that the teenager appeared scared, had a “scratchy voice” and had noticeably insufficient dental hygiene.
“Her braces looked pretty bad. She had braces on when she went missing in Arizona in 2019. It looked like she still had the same braces on,” Smith said.
Though the interaction was the first time he ever spoke to the missing girl, Smith estimates he saw her about 30 times while living at the apartment.
“I would see both of them walking out,” he said. “Quite often. I think I saw them holding hands once when they were leaving.”
Alicia Navarro’s mysterious reappearance: What we know so far
Who is Alicia Navarro?
Alicia Navarro is a previously missing 18-year-old from Arizona who unexpectedly turned up in a Montana police station nearly four years after her disappearance.
When did she disappear?
In 2019, the girl left her family’s Glendale, Arizona, home in the middle of the night just a few days before her 15th birthday. Her parents found a handwritten note from Navarro saying: “I ran away. I will be back. I swear. I’m sorry.”
Where was she found?
Navarro walked into a police station in a tiny Montana town about 40 miles from the Canadian border — and some 1,000 miles from home — and identified herself as the missing girl from Arizona.
Is she facing any charges?
Authorities in Navarro’s hometown of Glendale, Arizona, said the teen is not facing any criminal charges and is not in any kind of legal trouble.
Why did she leave?
Alicia’s mother, Jessica Nuñez, previously raised concerns that Navarro, who was diagnosed as high-functioning on the autism spectrum, may have been lured away by someone she met online.
“They were very shy, closed-off people.”
Smith had spoken to the man living with Navarro shortly after moving in last year, but the anonymous man began avoiding Smith after finding out he was from a city just nine miles from where Navarro vanished three years prior.
“When I first moved in, he came up to me and asked why I moved to Havre. I told him [I’m from] Phoenix, Arizona and after that he got quiet and bridged off. He wanted to end the conversation almost like I don’t want to talk about Arizona,” Smith recalled.
Feds and scores of cops were at the building on Wednesday, he said.
Smith believes Navarro is still living inside.
A woman who lives across the street said she was questioned by authorities on Thursday.
“At the end, they asked if I’ve seen a girl about 18 with dark, long hair,” she the woman, who declined to give her name.
She said the authorities gave a minimal description of the man, but she remembered them describing him as “heavy-set”
The couple described him the same way, said he’s in his late 20s.
Police said Friday that a man was detained and questioned in connection to Navarro’s disappearance, though it is unclear whether it was the same individual she had shared the Havre apartment with.
Navarro fled her family home just days before her 15th birthday, leaving behind a note that read: “I ran away. I will be back. I swear. I’m sorry.”
A missing person report from years prior described Navarro as autistic but high-functioning.
Navarro is still being considered a victim, police previously said, while the family’s private investigators exclusively told The Post Thursday that Navarro had only “spoken briefly” to her mother, but her intentions regarding whether she planned to return home were unclear.
Navarro told police she was not being held against her will and could come and go freely, and said she had not been hurt. Police have said she does not face criminal charges.
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