{"id":115214,"date":"2026-01-28T16:31:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-28T16:31:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/115214\/"},"modified":"2026-01-28T16:31:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-28T16:31:08","slug":"long-island-teen-missing-for-more-than-two-weeks-after-traveling-into-nyc-police-say","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/115214\/","title":{"rendered":"Long Island teen missing for more than two weeks after traveling into NYC, police say"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A 15-year-old Long Island boy has been<a href=\"https:\/\/suffolkpd.org\/Alerts\/Press-Releases\/ArtMID\/10029\/ArticleID\/14352?\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\"> missing for more than two weeks<\/a> after he left school and traveled into New York City, officers said.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.cbsnews.com\/newyork\/video\/suffolk-county-police-department-welcomes-new-therapy-dog\/\" target=\"_blank\" data-invalid-url-rewritten-http=\"\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Suffolk County police <\/a>said Thomas Medlin, from Saint James, left The Stony Brook School around 3:30 p.m. on Jan. 9 and ran to the train station.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>He was last seen on surveillance video at Grand Central Station in Manhattan at about 5:30 p.m. that day.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>There were reports that Medlin went missing after he went to see someone he met on the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/cbsloc.al\/4t5Z52I\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">popular online gaming platform Roblox<\/a>. \u00a0<\/p>\n<p>      <img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/thomas-medlin.png#.png\" alt=\"thomas-medlin.png \" height=\"349\" width=\"620\" class=\" lazyload\"  loading=\"lazy\"\/><\/p>\n<p>                Suffolk County Police Department<\/p>\n<p>Medlin is white, 130 pounds and 5 feet 4 inches tall. The teen was last seen wearing a black jacket with red stripes, dark sweatpants with white stripes, a black backpack and glasses, according to police.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Anyone with information is asked to call Fourth Squad Detectives at 631-854-8452.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Roblox launches investigation into missing teen<\/p>\n<p>Roblox officials said they followed a standard process and launched an investigation when they learned Medlin was missing.<\/p>\n<p>They said they didn&#8217;t see any instances of Medlin or the people he was talking to sharing phone numbers or other contact information. All messages were &#8220;consistent with typical in-game discussion,&#8221; and he did not use voice chat.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We are holding Thomas and his family in our hearts as we hope for his safe return,&#8221; a statement read. &#8220;We will continue to provide our full support to law enforcement throughout their investigation.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Roblox installs more protections for minors<\/p>\n<p>The platform announced in November that it&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cbsnews.com\/video\/roblox-rolls-out-new-safety-features-including-ai-age-verification\/?intcid=CNM-00-10abd1h\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" data-invalid-url-rewritten-http=\"\">strengthening guardrails<\/a> for its users under 18.<\/p>\n<p>Officials said AI-powered facial age-estimation technology will be installed to help verify age. This, combined with ID-based verification and parental consent, will help verify users&#8217; ages.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The protections are meant to limit communication between adults and minors unless they already know each other in real life.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"content__tags__label\">In:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A 15-year-old Long Island boy has been missing for more than two weeks after he left school and&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":115215,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[3129,9,24,55,54,56],"class_list":{"0":"post-115214","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york-city","8":"tag-missing-person","9":"tag-new-york","10":"tag-new-york-city","11":"tag-new-york-city-headlines","12":"tag-new-york-city-news","13":"tag-ny"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115214"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115214\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/115215"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}