Authorities are always doing their best to solve cases of missing people, and for the wide public to step in and give a helping hand in such cases isn’t that unusual. However, the case of four-year-old Yvette who was kidnapped by her own father got a happy ending in a very unusual way.
When the court decided the girl wasn’t safe by her father’s side and granted custody to her grandparents, Gary and Kim Forester, her dad, Virgil, fled with her.
Gary and Kim were desperate to find their granddaughter. Police were searching everywhere but there was no sign of where Yvette could be.
That’s when the grandparents decided to contact Virgil’s Facebook friends and ask them whether they had been in contact with him since he left town.
One of them, Harry Brown, was friends with “Mark Johnson,” which was the name Virgil used. When they asked Harry how the two knew each other and whether they had spoken recently, Harry explained how they used to chat because they had a lot of thing in common based on the groups they liked.
“He had been tagged in a meme I liked so we connected on Facebook and spoke a few times about a year ago,” Harry told Fox LA. “As soon as I got this message I thought wow I need to start trying to message him again cause he thought we were good friends at that point because we’ve had a few conversations before.”
The grandparents then asked from him to get in touch with Virgil and try to discover his location. Harry agreed and messaged Virgil, asking what he was up to. At first, Harry tried to persuade Virgil to send him a screenshot of the weather app, but failed.
He then thought of offering his virtual friend some pizza and asked him to send him his address. Virgil agreed eventually, but instead of a delivery guy, police officers knocked on his door.
“They had two grand in reward money and they sent that over straight away and they paid for my flight here, flight back, everything,” Harry said after Yvette was back with her grandparents. He was glad he could help, and he did it from the comfort of his living room in England, some 5,000 miles away.
You can check the whole story and Harry’s interview in the video below.