Four U.S.-born children have disappeared from a town in Chihuahua where they were living with their mother and are now possibly in the United States.

The siblings aged nine to 14 went missing in Lázaro Cárdenas, a town in the municipality of Meoqui, on Saturday, according to the Chihuahua Attorney General’s Office (FGE).

All four — three boys and a girl — were born in South Dakota, according to missing person posters published on the FGE Facebook page. Those posters indicated that the youngest child is nine-year-old Elías Gómez Herrera Luis Mendoza and that the three others — Madahi, Ismael and Issac — are 12-year-old triplets.

However, the FGE said in a statement on Monday that Madahi is 13, Ismael is 14, Issac is 12 and Elías is nine. The surname of all four is Gómez Herrera Luis Mendoza.

A message on the missing person posters for each of the four children says that they left their home together and haven’t been seen since. They lived in Lázaro Cárdenas with their mother, who reported their disappearance to the FGE.

“According to people close to one of the adolescents, they may have left of their own volition to return to the United States,” the Attorney General’s Office said.

The FGE said that is is presumed that they left home while their mother was out shopping for food. It said that it had established that the eldest sibling told a person close to him that they planned to go to Oklahoma, “where they are originally from and where their father lives.”

The FGE said it hadn’t ruled out the possibility that the siblings were “being helped by adults” to reach Oklahoma.

Meoqui is in central Chihuahua about 500 kilometers south of the border city of Ciudad Juárez.

The FGE said that it is collaborating with authorities in Mexico and the United States to locate the children.

Mexico News Daily