Rescuing a kidnapped girl from her predator captors

 

The BBC has the fascinating story of how a girl who'd been missing for six years was finally traced and rescued.  It's too long to cite everything here, but this excerpt gives you some idea of the care and attention to detail involved.

Squire and his team could see, from the type of light sockets and electrical outlets visible in the images, that Lucy was in North America. But that was about it.

They contacted Facebook, which at the time dominated the social media landscape, asking for help scouring uploaded family photos - to see if Lucy was in any of them. But Facebook, despite having facial recognition technology, said it "did not have the tools" to help.

So Squire and his colleagues analysed everything they could see in Lucy's room: the bedspread, her outfits, her stuffed toys. Looking for any element which might help.

And then they had a minor breakthrough. The team discovered that a sofa seen in some of the images was only sold regionally, not nationally, and therefore had a more limited customer base.

But that still amounted to about 40,000 people.

"At that point in the investigation, we're [still] looking at 29 states here in the US. I mean, you're talking about tens of thousands of addresses, and that's a very, very daunting task," says Squire.

The team looked for more clues. And that is when they realised something as mundane as the exposed brick wall in Lucy's bedroom could give them a lead.

"So, I started just Googling bricks and it wasn't too many searches [before] I found the Brick Industry Association," says Squire.

"And the woman on the phone was awesome. She was like, 'how can the brick industry help?'"

She offered to share the photo with brick experts all over the country. The response was almost immediate, he says.

One of the people who got in touch was John Harp, who had been working in brick sales since 1981.

"I noticed that the brick was a very pink-cast brick, and it had a little bit of a charcoal overlay on it. It was a modular eight-inch brick and it was square-edged," he says. "When I saw that, I knew exactly what the brick was," he adds.

It was, he told Squire, a "Flaming Alamo".

"[Our company] made that brick from the late 60s through about the middle part of the 80s, and I had sold millions of bricks from that plant."

Initially Squire was ecstatic, expecting they could access a digitised customer list. But Harp broke the news that the sales records were just a "pile of notes" that went back decades.

He did however reveal a key detail about bricks, Squire says.

"He goes: 'Bricks are heavy.' And he said: 'So heavy bricks don't go very far.'"

This changed everything. The team returned to the sofa customer list and narrowed that down to just those clients who lived within a 100-mile radius of Harp's brick factory in the US south-west.

There's much more at the link.  It's well worth reading in full, to give you some idea of the difficulties involved in tracing missing children.

The horrifying part of the story, to me at any rate, is that when police finally raided the house and rescued the girl, they learned she'd been raped by a sexual predator for six years.  Six years - and she was 12 years old when rescued.  That means she'd been missing and abused for half her life.  She was a child, with no resources to call on, no parent to lean on, nobody to help at all.  How she survived such abuse is something I can't comprehend.  Now in her 20's, she has a few things to say in the article about her experiences.

There are literally hundreds of thousands of missing children in our country.  Many of them were sent here by human traffickers, sold on to predators and abusers across the country.  It's heartbreaking to think that Lucy is only one such person.  If only we were all more alert to the warning signs, we might be able to help so many more . . .

Peter