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On January 1, 2002, when Alicia Kozakiewicz was only 13-years-old, she crept out the front door of her Crafton Heights home in the suburbs of Pittsburgh to meet someone for the first time in person who she had been chatting with online for the past nine months. She mistakenly believed that she would be meeting a boy who was just about her age, someone she’d grown to view as a trusted best friend. Alicia’s case became the first one in the United States that highlighted online predators who targeted young girls.
What followed became an absolute nightmare that changed Alicia’s life forever. Since her harrowing ordeal, she has courageously made it her mission to protect other children from her fate & has had a law named after her in several U.S. states.
Looking back on Christmas of 2001 & part of New Year’s Day 2002, Alicia has fond memories, but as New Year’s Day wore on, what went from a wonderful time spent with relatives morphed into an unimaginable nightmare.
New Year’s Day was always a time for celebration for Alicia & her family of four. While her mom, Mary, was a stay-at-home mom, her dad, Charles, was a car salesman & she had an older brother. She fondly recalls the big meal her mom would prepare that included a traditional Polish New Year’s meal of pork & sauerkraut.
On Tuesday, January 1, 2002, the family who gathered together that day included Aicia, her mom, her dad, her grandmother, her brother & his girlfriend. The moments they spent together were the last peaceful, innocent times of her childhood.
Sometime between dinner & dessert, Alicia told her mom that she had a stomachache & asked if she could be excused to go & lie down. Rather than retreating to her bed or to the couch, Alicia instead slipped past the Christmas tree that was decorated near the front door & slipped out, leaving the safety & warmth of her house to meet someone from the internet who she thought was a friend.
Alicia was an 8th grader at Carlynton Junior High School, she loved writing & that year at Christmas, she gifted her parents poems that she wrote. She was typically a rule-follower who never went outside by herself after dark without permission.
New Year’s Day 2002 was one of the coldest, iciest & darkest nights of the year in Crafton Heights. At 13-years-old, Alicia was afraid of the dark & she hated the cold, but that night, she’d left her house without a coat. She recalls just how eerily silent the streets were as the snow seemed to soundproof the world around her. There were no dogs barking & she could only hear the sound of the snow crunching under her feet. As she walked about a block or so up the icy street, she was the only soul in her neighborhood braving the frigid cold of the night while most were likely cozied up inside with their families, celebrating the holiday just as Alicia had been doing only moments before.
As she reached the street corner, Alicia heard the voice of her intuition in her head speak the words, Alicia, what are you doing? This is really dangerous, you need to go home.
As her better judgment seemed to prevail, Alicia was nearly able to escape the nightmare ahead when she turned on her heel & began walking back in the direction of her house. Just as she did, she heard the sound of her name being called & in the next moment, she felt herself being pulled by the arm into a car by a strange adult man.
Stranger abductions are rare & account for 1% of the missing children cases reported to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
Up until that moment, Alicia’s childhood had been idyllic. While she was growing up, her mom stayed home & she was always there whenever she needed her. Her brother, who was nine years older, was also a constant support in her life. Despite the fact that her father worked long hours to provide for his family, he always made time to spend together. She thinks back on a tight-knit family & a childhood that was full of fun. Tragically, her innocence was stripped away in an instant as the car drove away from the familiarity of her neighborhood. Glancing back, she shuddered when she noticed handcuffs & ropes in the back seat.
Alicia realizes that because she was a young teen who was protected & sheltered by her comforting family, she was likely very naive. She believed that the world was a fully happy, joyful place that resembled a Disney movie where happy people expressed themselves by walking through the world singing.
Alicia’s older brother introduced her to the internet since he so often played online games. As she became more interested, she realized that the internet was a great place to play games & chat with other people, never once questioning her safety while she spent time online. She was a trusting person who didn’t yet realize that evil can exist inside a person.
Alicia’s parents taught her the concept of stranger danger, but when she met strangers online & began to chat with them, she was in the safety of her own home which gave her a false sense of security. She gradually learned more about the person on the other end until they felt like a friend regardless of the fact they’d never met in person.
When Alicia found herself in the strange man’s car, the internet was in its infancy; there was no Wi-Fi & she used a dial-up to get online. Because it was so new, there were very few people educating children about the dangers of meeting people online.
After Alicia got herself a screenname, she began spending a lot of time online chatting about anything & everything with the people she befriended in a Yahoo chatroom & everyone seemed so friendly & kind. Alicia viewed the internet as a safe place where social status didn’t seem to exist; the most popular kids would openly talk with the less popular kids.
After Alicia befriended someone who she believed was a boy right around her age, they began chatting day & night & she came to find that they had so many things in common. He listened to her talk about the things that were important in her life, he gave advice when needed & he allowed Alicia to open up, be herself & freely complain or discuss any topic that came up. No matter what, he always took her side & it wasn’t long before he became her best friend. As they continued to tighten their bond over the next eight to nine months, this person became a constant comfort in Alicia’s life at a time when she had no idea that online grooming existed.
She later realized that it’s a predator’s goal to make a victim feel like the best thing in their eyes; you become the coolest, prettiest, most interesting person & this naturally makes a person feel good. Because it feels like a friendship, red flags are oftentimes missed & the person being groomed doesn’t recognize what’s happening. Slowly & steadily, a predator will break down barriers that quiet the cautious voice in a child’s head that tells them that something isn’t right.
The process of grooming can take weeks, months or even years, but the end goal is always the same; to gain unsupervised access to the child for the purpose of sexually abusing them & keeping them from disclosing. In 79% of cases, the abuser is known to the family & involves a relative, neighbor, acquaintance or friend.
As Alicia slipped out her front door & into the cold darkness of New Year’s Day 2002 & found herself inside a stranger’s car, the man held her hand so tightly that she thought her bones would snap under the pressure. He ordered her to be good & be quiet & if she didn’t obey, he would put her in the trunk.
As Alicia helplessly watched the familiar streets of her neighborhood pass by her window, she could only hope & pray he would just drive around the block & bring her back home. However, the street names quickly went from being familiar to her being nowhere near her home.
As the car continued on & eventually slowed near a tow booth, Alicia thought it would be her opportunity to be saved. She thought that the person working inside the booth would notice her tears & rescue her, but the man in the booth never even saw her & if he did, he didn’t realize anything was wrong.
She was utterly terrified, believing that the man could pull over at any moment & kill her. They drove together for more than five hours from her home in Pittsburgh to his home in Virginia. When the car finally stopped, the man pulled her out & dragged her into the house & down a flight of stairs that felt like an endless maze. She described the place as hell; it was overrun with cats, comic books & computers.
Once inside the basement dungeon that was stocked with knives, whips, chains & a cage, the man locked Alicia in a room with a door that was secured with a padlock. She noticed strange devices on the walls that her 13-year-old mind wasn’t able to comprehend.
The true nightmare began when the man removed Alicia’s clothing & said, This is going to be really hard for you. It’s okay to cry. He placed a dog collar around her neck, dragged her to his bedroom upstairs & raped her. He chained her to the floor next to his bed with the dog collar & for four days, he continued to rape, beat & torture her.
During this time, Alicia had zero control of her life or her fate, but she did everything in her power to survive no matter how humiliating, painful or disgusting it was. When she tried to fight back, she ended up with a broken nose. She knew without a shred of a doubt that if he was so willing to kidnap, rape & torture her, he would also murder her without a second thought.
On the fourth day of captivity, the man told Alicia, I’m beginning to like you too much. Tonight we’re going to go for a ride. At that moment, she knew that he was going to kill her & there was absolutely nothing she could do about it. It was also on the fourth day of captivity that he fed her for the first time. After the man served her food, he left for work.
Now alone in this house of horrors, Alicia found herself crying & praying as she thought of all of the things she would do if she were stronger. She envisioned herself a superhero in a movie & thought that if she was going to be killed, she wouldn’t allow herself to go down without a fight. At the same time, she also thought about all of the horrific things that had happened throughout those four days & she found herself losing all hope.
During her days of captivity Alicia thought a lot about her parents & she was sure that they were desperately searching for her. She knew they loved her so much & without a doubt, they would find her, but she wasn’t sure if they would find her in time.
As the day continued on, she began to accept her own death & drifted into a dazed sort of state until she was suddenly jarred awake by the sound of angry men banging on the door downstairs. Believing they were there to kill her rather than save her, Alicia rolled under the bed to hide & remained as quiet as she possibly could. By the sounds of it, the men were moving quickly through the house & she could hear them shouting, Clear! Clear!
It’s likely Alicia made some sort of noise because she heard a man shout, Movement over there! While she remained hidden under the bed, she saw boots coming around as a voice ordered her to crawl out from under the bed & put her hands up. Alicia remembers dragging the heavy, cold chain out as she tried to both conceal her nude body & hold her hands up at the same time. When she emerged from under the bed, she was looking down the barrel of a gun.
For an instant, Alicia thought this was the moment she was going to die, but as one of the men turned, she saw FBI printed on the back of his jacket. Soon, more people were rushing into the room & cutting the chains from around her neck as they helped her up & set her free.
Alicia came to learn that while she was being held captive, her kidnapper livestreamed her abuse online & bragged that he finally got a teen sex slave. He showed a picture of a bound & naked Alicia at his home under the username slave master for teen girls. One of the viewers recognized the little girl in the horrific video as the face of the child on the missing person posters. Because of this, Alicia urges people to pay attention to missing posters or alerts that are released to the public because the greater majority of children are rescued because of these alerts.
After seeing the video, the viewer contacted the FBI & reported the screenname of the abuser. The FBI was able to track the person down through his IP address which is how Alicia was saved. The way she sees this is that one monster came forward about another.
Alicia realizes how close she came to not being saved that day had there been a delay of any kind. She knew that her captor was due to come home from his job where he worked as a computer programmer at 4:30 pm & the FBI agents arrived at 4:10 pm. She now knows that 74% of children who are abducted by a stranger will be killed within the first three hours.
Alicia recalls some of the response she got after her abduction where people would comment things in regards to the four days she remained captive, You’re so lucky, that’s not that long. She wants to make it clear that someone could be held captive for days, abused by someone you love for years or molested for 15 seconds on a bus, but it’s the victim’s pain & experience that defines it rather than the length of time & what actually occurred.
Since Alicia’s case was the first in the country where an online predator targeted a young girl, people couldn’t understand how it happened or how she could have been groomed so they placed the blame on her. Throughout this time, she is forever grateful for those who did support & care for her.
In the nine months that she befriended this online stranger, she hadn’t been chatting with someone her own age, she was actually talking to 38-year-old Scott Tyree. After he abducted her from Pittsburgh, he made the 240 mile (386 km) drive to his rented townhome in the 700 block of Hemlock Court in Herndon, Virginia.
According to his landlord, he’d been living in the three-bedroom townhome for the past 6 years & usually paid his $1,000/month rent in cash. He moved in by himself, lived with a woman for a few years, but was currently living alone. A neighbor indicated that he generally kept to himself & although his curtains were normally kept open, she had noticed that in recent days they had been closed. There had never been any sign that something horrible was going on inside.
When Tyree spoke with his neighbors, he told them that he planned to spend New Year’s Eve at an Alcoholics Anonymous party. Since that time, they hadn’t seen nor heard anything suspicious.
According to Tyree’s mother, she was convinced that investigators made a mistake since she felt he had always been a good son & a very good father to his 12-year-old daughter. His daughter, who was only one year younger than Alicia, had only just visited him & he brought her back to his ex-wife’s home in California earlier on New Year’s Day before he abducted Alicia.
In 2003 Scott Tyree pleaded guilty to taking a minor across state lines for the purpose of sex & producing sexually explicit images. He was sentenced to 19 years & 7 months behind bars in North Carolina. When he was paroled & released in 2019 after serving 17 years, he was shockingly sent to live in a halfway house in Pittsburgh that was only four miles from Alicia’s parent’s house in Crafton Heights.
Alicia & her family were outspoken about the fact that her abductor was released to the Pittsburgh area & voiced their worries that he might victimize them again. Because he was in such close proximity to her family’s home, Alicia didn’t feel safe to visit her parents.
Alicia didn’t learn about Tyree’s release from the state of Pennsylvania, but rather through a media inquiry on her Facebook page. The state claimed that they alerted her via a single email that she says she never received. Although she knew the day of his release would eventually come, she never expected to find out as she had & stressed that the state’s notification system needs to be updated.
While in the halfway house, Tyree visited pornographic websites which was a violation of his parole. A judge revoked his probation & sentenced him to two more years behind bars.
From the beginning, Alicia & her family vowed to turn her nightmare into something positive by helping to make a difference in the lives of other children & families. Since they realized that internet safety was not being taught to children in schools, at only 14-years old, Alicia began visiting schools, giving presentations & sharing her story. This came after she started her healing process that involved counseling. She knew that what happened to her can happen to anyone.
In 2003, one year after her abduction, Alicia also launched The Alicia Project which is an advocacy group to raise awareness about online predators, abduction & child sexual exploitation.
During her talks with students, she’s able to see that sharing her story & her pain makes it much more real than a child hearing something on the news. When she shows children a photo of herself as a smiling 13-year-old sitting at her computer, she tells them, This little girl is you. What happened to Alicia was something she could have never imagined would ever happen, but it did. As soon as a child is old enough to get online, education regarding internet safety needs to begin.
While Alicia has shared her story around the globe to bring awareness to the importance of internet safety, she feels that if she can stop what happened to her from happening to even a single child, it will all be worth it.
Despite the fact that the internet has changed drastically in the past 20+ years, the dangers remain & have only escalated. Now in 2025, children have the internet in their hands 24/7 which increases the exposure to potential predators who prey on sites that children frequent.
According to Alicia, many children that she speaks with believe they are beyond the reach of internet predators while she reminds them that they aren’t. She encourages an open line of communication between parents or caregivers & children. Oftentimes, kids fear that if they open up to their parents about online issues, they might risk having their devices taken from them. She advocates parents to take an active interest in how their children engage with the internet while monitoring their online activities without viewing it as snooping or getting a child into trouble. The focus should be about preventing a predator from targeting & harming a child.
Because many children using social media want to reach as many people as possible as they dream of making a viral video & becoming famous, their profiles may not be set to private. According to a 2011 FBI warning about child predators, nearly 70% of kids within the U.S. would accept a friend request regardless of the sender. Over 65% of online sex offenders use social media to gather information about their victims.
Alicia urges parents to know their child’s passwords, to check in on their online activities & to prevent them from having access to a phone or device late at night within the privacy of their bedroom where activity can’t be monitored. If a child utilizes their phone as an alarm, a separate alarm can be purchased for that purpose. Personal information should never be shared & privacy settings should be activated.
Alicia encourages parents to abandon the idea that because we’re good parents & our children are well behaved, then they’re immune from danger. Oftentimes, it’s children who are raised in a loving, safe home who feel they are in a bubble of safety where they can’t be harmed & don’t recognize that they too can be pulled into a dangerous situation.
Alicia also works alongside The National Association to Protect Children which was established in 2004 to secure the passage of Alicia’s Law in all 50 states within the United States. Due to a lack of dedicated federal resources, less than 2% of known child exploitation cases are being investigated. By taking 6% from the fines & fees one would pay for committing a crime, the law provides dedicated funding to the Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Force Program which is dedicated to investigating, prosecuting & developing effective responses to internet crimes against children.
Alicia struggled for years with personal relationships after her harrowing abduction; even a loving touch suddenly felt evil. Inspired by the FBI agents who saved her, she went on to get a master’s degree in forensic psychology to work with children & families that have been affected by abduction or child sexual exploitation. One day after her graduation, she got married to a man who supports her mission. She’s come to learn that rape is all about power & control while love never is. And although her abduction forever changed her life, she refused to allow it to define who she is.
As Alicia reflects on the normal 13-year-old she was before her abduction, she mourns for that child who was stolen from her. She feels that that child was murdered & the person she was at that time is still chained in that room, still suffering. Her abduction taught her that the boogy man is real & he most definitely lives on the internet. He lives in everyone’s computers & while you go about your business, he is at home with your children.
If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, please contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4637) or go to rainn.org.
References:
- CBS News: Online predator convicted of sexual assault violates parole, returns to jail
- BBC News: Kidnapped by a pedophile I met online
- The Alicia Project: About Alicia Kozakiewicz
- ABC 4 WTAE: Crafton Heights victims speaks out as man who kidnapped her when she was 13-years-old is released
- ABC News: Emotional testimony from online predator victim
- The Intelligencer: Abduction survivor speaks to John Marshall students about online safety
- CNN: I, too, am an abduction survivor
- People: How to protect children from internet predators: ‘Get used to uncomfortable conversations,’ says survivor
- New York Post: Kidnapping survivor remembers dragging ‘cold, heavy chain’ from captor’s dungeon
- Raising Arizona Kids: 5 questions for internet safety advocate Alicia Kozakiewicz
- Brut. Abduction survivor advocates for internet safety
- The Washington Post: Missing Pa. girl found tied up in Va. home
- Pittsburgh: Taken
- ABC News: Childhood abduction survivor Alicia Kozakiewicz tells her story of recovery
- National Center for Missing & Exploited Children: Non-family abductions & attempts
- ICAC Task Force Program
- WFMY News 2: Survivor: ‘I was raped & beaten & tortured’
- People: At 13, she was abducted & tortured by an online predator. Now, she’s determined to keep other kids safe
- Bravehearts: What is grooming?
