Story Archive

She’s Like, Likeable

Alexis Waller, 11, called for a taxi to take her from Bryant, Ark., to Jacksonville, Florida — an 850-mile trip. The driver “didn’t really ask anything, he just asked me where I needed to go,” Alexis said. Well, he did ask one other question: “He’s like, ‘do you have money?’ and I’m like, ‘yes’.” She had, police say, stolen $10,000 in cash from her grandmother’s sock drawer to pay for the ride, so she could visit a boy she had met on vacation two years before. When the Waller family woke up and found Alexis was gone, they called police. Officers tracked the call to the cab company, and called the driver; by then, they had made it to Atlanta. “I’m actually glad I got found,” Alexis says. “I knew I made a mistake after a while.” It took her parents nine hours to drive to Atlanta to pick her up. “You just want to hug her and just love her because you got her back and thats what’s important,” said her father, Brent Waller. “You have the rest of your life to punish her.” (RC/KARK Little Rock) ...Which happens to be how long her grounding will last.