In 2013, TikToker Toni (@t.mariee__) was kidnapped and held for ransom, all because of her best friend. At the time, she had just started her first semester of college. She was at home typing up a paper when her best friend called her.
Apparently, some guy she was with had kicked her out of his car, so she was now at a bus station. Toni drove 15 minutes to get her friend and parked next to a liquor store.
Her friend acted like she was about to go into the liquor store, but suddenly stopped and remained seated in the car.
“She opens her door, and she has it cracked open, but she never got out,” said Toni. “She acted as if she got a text message, and she stopped in her tracks because of the text message.”
So, the girls were both on their phones, and the next thing they knew, there was a strange man at the back door of the car. Toni had seen this man walking on the sidewalk nearby.
Before Toni had time to react and lock the doors, the man got in. He pointed a gun at her head and threatened to kill her if they didn’t listen to him.
He did the same to her best friend. He then ordered Toni to drive off the main road and turn into a neighborhood for two blocks before coming to a stop.
“I want to emphasize the fact that my best friend pretended as if she was going into the store to make sure this guy would have a way in the car, because if I would have seen him, I would have locked the door, and there’d be no way for him to get in,” said Toni.
Once they stopped, he made the girls get out and shoved them into the trunk. Toni lay there in shock. The man seemingly stopped at a store to pick up some duct tape.
Sign up for Chip Chick’s newsletter and get stories like this delivered to your inbox.
The next time they got out of the car, they were in an alleyway. He taped their eyes and hands and shoved them back into the trunk.
At the next stop, someone put a blanket over her head and carried her up some stairs into a house. She was thrown into a closet. A few minutes later, the man came over with her phone and forced her to unlock it so he could call her mom and demand ransom money.
The man returned to the closet and told her to speak into the phone. She started crying. She was still under the impression that her best friend was a victim, too.
Her best friend pretended that she was being forced to go down into their basement. Later, she found out that was not the case, and they had asked her mom for $5,000.
They also tried to blame the crime on an up-and-coming rapper Toni had been talking to, but she never saw or heard him while she was being kidnapped.
At one point, they went out to use her bank card to get some money. Before they left, they tied her to a chair in the closet. The next morning, they gave her a bowl of barbecue chips to eat. Her friend returned to the closet and told her that they demanded money from her mom, too.
Finally, they walked her out and dropped her off in an alleyway, where she then knocked on the door of a nearby house for help.
By Emily Chan
Emily Chan is a writer who covers lifestyle and news content. She graduated from Michigan State University with a degree in... More about Emily Chan
