Jenea Patterson: 18-year-old Pennsylvania girl dead of an apparent drug overdose

Jenea Patterson, 18, died Wednesday, January 25, 2017 after an apparent drug overdose. The Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania teen was known to run away from home, even as far as New York.

WILKES-BARRE -- A troubled teenage girl is dead after a drug overdose after years of fighting an addiction that took her to one seedy place after another along the East Coast.

Now three men who tried to save her, including her father, are in considerable legal trouble after being pulled over with guns in their vehicle.

Jenea Patterson, 18, died of an apparent drug overdose last month at a hospital near Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, her father, James Patterson told the Associated Press.

"When I went down to get her in New York, I told her right then and there this is a warning sign for you," Patterson told the AP. "I grabbed her and I held her in my arms and I said 'You've gotta get out of the game, Jenea, death is knocking at your door.'"

Jenea was purportedly nursing a heroin addiction. Last year, an Amber Alert was issued for her and local media reported the story that she was abducted at gunpoint by a male companion. Then she reappeared only to change her story.

Last summer, her father along with two others traveled to New York with a cache of weapons in hopes of freeing her from a heroin den in the Bronx.

The trio became affiliated with a group called "Enough is Enough" and went to "rescue" Jenea from a dingy Bedford-Stuyvesant apartment, after she sent texted one of them for help. She apparently sent a picture of a dead body beside her.

Mr. Patterson said his daughter got hooked on prescription pills age age 13. She soon moved to harder drugs. The family tried to help her, but she didnt' stay long in programs.

"I begged people, if you let that child on the street, she's going to die," Patterson was quoted as saying. "Here we are two years later, I'm burying my daughter."