She Found A Missing Girl Whose Dad Got Angry With Her For Wanting To Collect The $55,000 Offered As A Reward For Finding The Kid
When a child goes missing and their family puts together some reward money in an effort to locate them, it can be an effective strategy to drum up viable leads.
According to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, if a parent offers up reward money for the recovery of their child, they are legally obligated to pay it if the terms laid out are met.
Now, this woman ended up finding a missing child whose family offered up a hefty sum of money if someone could manage to bring her home.
She has an interesting job that requires her to travel around a lot. She happened to be at a motel for work one day, when she spotted a little girl fetching snacks from the vending machine.
An older man was with her, and she instantly realized she had seen this 12-year-old girl reported as missing on the news.
“The family had offered a 55k reward for any information resulting in her coming home. I honestly only really remembered her face because of the reward, and the weird choice of picture the family chose to show for her,” she explained.
“I called the police immediately, saying I was almost positive it was the girl. Within minutes, the guy was getting arrested, and they were taking her off to the hospital.”
She was right. The girl at the motel was the same missing girl she had seen on the news, and her tip was what solved the case.
The missing girl had met the 28-year-old man she saw with her online, and the girl thought this man was her boyfriend.
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The girl spoke to the man online for months before meeting up with him, and it got really horrific from there. While the girl’s family did say thank you for her tip, they never addressed the reward money.
One day after she called in the tip, she reached out to the girl’s dad on social media, questioning him about the reward money.
“He was shocked I would even want it. But like, he promised 55k. That was enough to pay off my student loans and then some,” she added.
“Why wouldn’t I? He said he needed to keep the money to pay for his daughter’s therapy and college. I asked if he was going back on his word.”
“He got very angry and sent me some paragraphs. I contacted a lawyer, and he sent the father basically an ‘intent to sue’ type of warning letter.”
Eventually, the dad forked the cash over to her, but first, he wrote some awful things about her online. This has caused her to get a lot of hate for accepting the reward money.
Her lawyer is pushing her to sue the dad for emotional distress and defamation. She’s not sure she wants to do that, even though her lawyer already wrote up a list of damages for her to pursue.
The bottom line here is that she’s worried she is somehow a jerk for collecting the reward money. And in case you’re curious, yes, she would have called the police even without the reward.
“I don’t understand why make a promise you have zero intention of honoring? I get he wanted his daughter home, but I don’t think that’s the right way to go about things,” she concluded.
What do you think?
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