By Kelly Morgan,Staff Writer

LEWISTON – Deciding to test out a new library card rather than going to school, two young girls sent city police and a handful of neighborhood volunteers scrambling when they disappeared for three hours Friday morning.

The sisters, 9 and 6 years old, walked from their Howe Street home all the way to the Lewiston Public Library instead of heading around the corner to Longely Elementary School that morning, according to police.

Lt. Don Mailhot said Friday the older girl had just received a new library card. “(She) thought it would be a good thing to try it out.”

The girls’ mother, Stacy Lahr, learned her daughters were missing after the school called to ask about their absence, Mailhot said.

Police began searching for the sisters at 9:33 a.m. After checking Lahr’s home and the school in case the girls were hiding, police began a full-scale, grid-style search of the neighborhood.

Mailhot said 12 uniformed officers, five officers in plain clothes, a couple of deputies from the Androscoggin County Sheriff’s Office and volunteers aided in the search. A police dog was called to the scene and the Maine State Police and Maine Warden Service were contacted before the girls were found.

At a gathering point in the Colisee parking lot, across the street from Longley Elementary, police looked over portraits of the blond girls as they headed out on the search.

In one of the photos, the younger girl smiled broadly in her pink dress with butterfly wings. She clutched a bouquet of tulips. The older girl wore a blue track suit.

Mailhot said Parking Enforcement Officer Pat Gagne had spotted the pair outside the library and, having heard their description over the radio, called in her find at 11 a.m., three hours after they were due at the school.

“It was a happy ending to something that could have been much worse,” Mailhot said.

Terry Savage, a Lewiston 19-year-old, was upstairs in the children’s section of the library and noticed the two young girls playing quietly and reading. She thought they looked young and asked them why they weren’t in school.

“First I thought they had a parent with them,” Savage said. “Then the little girl said (to her younger sister), C’mon, we have to go to school.'”

Savage was with the children outside the library when Gagne spotted them. It took some coaxing, but eventually both children got in a police car that had arrived. An officer said the girls would be taken back to the school.

The girls’ mother could not be reached for comment Friday, nor could Lewiston School Superintendent Leon Levesque.

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