College Student Uses iPhone Location To Get Rescued From Her Rapist
This was some smart thinking on this woman's part.
She shared her location via her phone with a friend while she was kidnapped by a man who raped her.
It eventually led to her rescue.
A Georgia college student who was raped and kidnapped last fall has shared the harrowing details of her experience — including how she saved her own life with some smart thinking and smart technology.Jaila Gladden, 21, was shopping at a grocery store one night in September 2017 when a stranger pressed a knife to her stomach, forced her into her car, raped her, and tried to drive her all the way to Michigan in a terrifying kidnapping attempt.The man, later identified by authorities as Timothy Wilson, didn't manage to get out of state, though, because Jaila led the police right to them with a smartphone and some very clever, clear-headed maneuvering, which she recently recounted to BuzzFeed.She told BuzzFeed that the man followed her right up to her car, where he held a knife to her stomach and ordered her to get in.He climbed into the driver's seat, and started to drive toward Atlanta, which was 50 miles away.Before they got there, they made a stop; the man pulled over into the back of an abandoned church, told her to take off her clothes, and raped her, telling her there was 'no purpose in crying' as she begged him to let her go.Following the rape, they got back on the road. The man said he was going drive to Michigan, and charged Jaila with finding a gas station for him to rob first.That's when Jaila had her bright idea. She convinced the man that she needed her phone to look up the locations of gas stations and help him navigate there. Surprisingly, he gave it to her — but she took no chances.She turned the brightness of the screen down as far as it would go so as not to draw attention, then opened up a text to her boyfriend, Tamir Bryant.She then used her iPhone's 'share my location' feature to send him her GPS data.'It was the most logical thing to do,' she said.Because she didn't want the man to catch her, Jaila was cautious with her texts, firing off only short messages. When Tamir asked why she was all the way in Atlanta, she replied, 'Kid napped.'Unsuspecting, the kidnapper nonetheless took the phone away and forced Jaila into the trunk of the car during his attempted (but unsuccessful) gas station robbery.When he wanted to try again at a grocery store, Jaila again said she needed her phone to guide him. Once there, she was forced into the trunk without her phone once more.Jaila was only able to fire off a quick line at a time, telling her boyfriend that they were in her car and she didn't want police approaching with sirens.'I don't want him to kill me,' she wrote.
The whole time, Tamir was able to track Jaila's location and provided updates for the police there. As they approached, an officer in the parking lot where the kidnapper had stopped noticed the idle car, which matched the description he'd heard on the scanner.
When the officer started getting closet to the car, the kidnapper saw him and tried to speed off, ignoring drawn weapons and several cars along the way, which he crashed into.
Finally, the kidnapper crashed into a fence, and managed to escape over it by foot. Jaila, though, was safe, and ran toward the police. -(Carly Stern, Daily Mail UK)