One clever mom from Southern California, after reporting her children missing 15 years ago, decided to do her own investigation using Facebook to see if she could find them. After all, they were ages 2 and 3 when their father took them and ran off, so now they’d be teenagers, and would very likely be online and into social networking.
Her clever use of internet speed paid off. The Associated Press reported, “The mother had found her daughter’s Facebook profile after searching for her name on the social networking site in March.” They didn’t go into detail if their names had been changed, or if she had to sift through hundreds or thousands of kids with the same first names, which is what we would imagine. Who would kidnap someone and then not change their names? And why wouldn’t the authorities be able to find someone who hadn’t changed their names? If it’s that easy, couldn’t the police be doing it too?
The kids have been living with their father in Florida. The mother apparently wrote directly to her daughter upon finding her, but the teenage girl told her mother she didn’t want to be in contact. It’s our guess that this is why the mother then chose to report the information to the police. She can’t have made life easier for the teenagers by having their father arrested for kidnapping and violating child custody orders.
Now the kids are living with a friend of the family, while they await the results of their father’s July 17th hearing in Florida.
Read the full Associated Press story on Yahoo at: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100606/ap_on_re_us/us_found_on_facebook.
Tags: Facebook, Internet Speed