Three months after an arrest warrant was issued for a Texas mother who allegedly left her two children home alone for months, Raven Yates was taken into custody multiple states away in Alabama.
In the interim, her posts on social media seemed to directly respond to social media posts made by authorities about the case, Roman Forest Chief of Police Stephen Carlisle tells PEOPLE.
According to a press release from the RFPD, Yates was apprehended on March 8 in Mobile, Ala., at an apartment complex where she “was staying with a male friend.”
Yates is accused of abandoning her 12-year-old daughter and 3-year-old son on Sept. 28 in Texas, according to the RFPD. The 12-year-old’s father notified authorities on Nov. 14 that the children were left home alone since September. The father, who has not been named, flew in from California, where he had been working, to check on the children.
“The father had been informed that his child’s mother had been seen in Mobile, Alabama, without her children and realized they were home alone because he had been asked by his daughter to send food regularly,” the release reads.
Yates is facing two counts of Abandon Endanger Child Without Intent to Return, according to the RFPD. It is not clear if she has entered pleas or retained an attorney to comment on her behalf.
In the time period after authorities issued the arrest warrant and before Yates was arrested, Yates was “actively making social media posts about the situation,” according to the release.
Carlisle, the RFPD Chief, tells PEOPLE that authorities didn’t initially release the story to the public because they wanted to try and track Yates down first, but when they were unable to, they informed the public, which caught a lot of people’s attention.
“She saw it, just like we figured she would, and then she started posting actively on social media because she’s that type of person that likes the attention,” Carlisle says.
He says authorities followed her social media posts hoping it would lead to information on her whereabouts, but ultimately a tip was what led to her arrest.
