A 13-year-old Texas girl was kidnapped, driven through several states, and then rescued after she displayed a “Help me!” handmade. sign in a California parking lot, authorities said.

Steven Robert Sablan, 61, of Cleburne, Texas, was charged in California on Thursday with one count of kidnapping and one count of transporting a minor with the intent to engage in criminal sexual activity, according to a press release from federal prosecutors.

The girl left home on July 6 without telling her parents because she had plans to visit a friend who moved to Australia a year earlier, prosecutors said.

She was walking to a bus stop in San Antonio when Mr. Sablan, whose name is spelled Sabalan in court records, pulled up in a gray Nissan Sentra, pointed a gun at her and said, “If you don’t get in the car with me, I’m going to hurt you,” according to court documents.

Fearing for her life, the victim complied, according to court documents.

At one point during the trip, the girl told Mr. Sablan about her friend in Australia. She said that she could take her on a cruise to get there, but that she would have to do something for him, according to court documents.

He then stopped and sexually assaulted her. Over the next two days, he drove her from Texas through New Mexico, Arizona and California, sexually assaulting her at various points along the way, according to court records.

On the morning of July 9, they stopped at a laundromat in Long Beach, California.

Mr. Sablan told her to change her clothes in the car and then took her clothes and went inside. This gave the girl the opportunity to write “Help me!” on a piece of paper.

A passerby called law enforcement, who upon arrival saw Mr. Sablan standing outside the vehicle and saw the girl, who uttered the word “help.”

Long Beach police described the girl as in a sentence as “visibly emotional and distraught”.

Officers searched the vehicle and found a BB gun, the girl’s sign, a switchblade knife and handcuffs, according to court documents.

Mr. Sablan was taken into custody and authorities determined the victim was a missing person on the run from San Antonio.

Sablan’s attorney could not be reached for comment on Saturday. Mr. Sablan is scheduled to be arraigned on July 31 in the US District Court in downtown Los Angeles.

Mr. Sablan was also wanted in connection with a robbery charge in Fort Worth, Texas. He was convicted of robbery with a deadly weapon in 1979, robbery and burglary with a deadly weapon in 1985 and possession of a controlled substance in 2016, prosecutors said.