Users of Facebook and social news site Reddit may have played a role in helping locate a runaway teen whose parents were “worried to death” after he disappeared from their Chicago home last week.
Late last week Redditor postlikeagirl noticed some “sickening” similarities between a post on the social news site and a story in the Chicago Tribune about 16-year-old runaway Chris Carpenter.
According to the Tribune article, Carpenter disappeared from his suburban Chicago home last Monday. He left with little more than a bike, a backpack full of clothes, and a laptop. His parents believed he was headed for Colorado.
That same day, a post by NemoViator appeared in Reddit’s AskReddit section. The poster, also from Chicago, said he was going to “fuck it all” and leave for Colorado or California. He was bringing his bicycle with him.
That tipped off postlikeagirl.
“It could all be coincidental, but that’s a little too coincidental for me,” postlikeagirl wrote. “There is a family that is looking for their child and if we know his whereabouts, we should be assisting them in finding him.”
Postlikeagirl asked redditors to call the police if they had information, offering a phone number and asked NemoViator to please call his parents or a third party to let them know he was OK.
That post received nearly 1,000 comments. Carpenter’s friends and family also launched a Facebook page and a Twitter campaign to help track him down.
Between the newspaper, the Reddit and Facebook posts, the case of the runaway teen got a lot of publicity.
And it seems to have paid off.
Police in Carpenter’s hometown of Naperville, Illinois located him earlier today after they received a phone call from a local citizen who recognized the teen from his description, according to the Chicago Tribune.
We’re not sure where the local citizen saw his picture. But just maybe
social media played a part as a kind of milk carton for the digital age.
Photo by Bidrohi >H!ROK<
