RapidSOS Technology Helps Rescue Kidnap Victim

Tense moments for 911 call takers as they get a cell phone call from a woman saying she’d been kidnapped. The kidnapper could be heard in the background threatening to blow her brains out among making other threats. The victim was found safe thanks to RapidSOS.

HOW RapidSOS WORKS

“We have this new technology we just implemented,” said Kristen Molander, Mesa Police Public Safety Communications Administrator.

“RapidSOS is a website that allows us to put a phone number into the system anytime somebody calls 911. And it pulls from the information from the caller’s phone — not just from their GPS — from the Apps that track their location. Your location is tracked whether you know it or not by phone apps. Every time you hit a Wifi spot it tracks your location.”

RapidSOS gives a current location and the last 10 or even 25 locations from the point a person calls 911. It provides data from millions of connected devices directly to 911 and first responders during emergencies, improving location accuracy.

KIDNAPPING CALL

“We really hadn’t had the opportunity to use it until one evening, when one of our call takers, Kimberly, was answering a 911 call,” explained Molander. “I can hear this call is not going well because I hear her say, ‘Have you been kidnapped?’ And the woman essentially says, ‘yes.’ She was saying she was in a car, on her way home, from out-of-state, needed to go back home but needs some help now.”

“The woman was frantic, and you could hear a verbal argument in the background,” said Mesa Police 911 Call Taker Kimberly Mendoza. “She said she was in a car and they were driving around. It took a little, but we clarified she was being held against her will, so it became a kidnapping call. And then our line disconnected.”

“These kinds of calls don’t happen as often as people think but we still pick up on it pretty quickly when somebody is not answering questions in a normal way or their answers don’t make sense,” said Molander. “That’s when Kimberly said, ‘Have you been kidnapped?’ and the woman said, ‘yes.’ And, so, Kimberly kept trying to get a good location from her but wasn’t able. But then the woman stopped responding to her questions.”

Call takers had a location from the cell phone but the woman was moving.

“The hard thing is you can retransmit to get a new location only so often,” explained Molander. “You have to wait about 30 seconds or so in between and that’s a long time when there’s an emergency. So, Kimberly puts in a call from the last known location she can see from her map and the woman disconnected. She calls her back. She answers but now she’s not responding or answering Kimberly’s questions and it’s obvious she just connected the line and set the phone in her lap so we can hear what’s going on. Kimberly is documenting everything she hears for the officers who are responding to the area.”

Over the next 10-15 minutes, the woman disconnects the line five more times, but operators keep calling back. Three people are working the call, in addition to the officers.

“We’re also working with the dispatcher to make sure officers have their sirens on,” said Molander. Kimberly could hear the sirens as they went by and tells officers to turn around. 

“At one point we even hear the guy say something like he’s going to blow her brains out,” Molander said. “So, it was getting pretty serious, pretty quick.”

“The line disconnects again and before Kimberly could call her back, the woman hits 911 and when she does the RapidSOS gives an exact location of where she was which was in a county island but at this point, we don’t care. We’re going anyway. We have officers speeding that way.”

About 20 minutes has gone by at this point.

“It was a domestic violence situation,” said Molander. “The guy was not letting her out of the vehicle. She just wanted to leave. She wanted to get out of the situation. The officers were able to get her out of the domestic violence situation. It was amazing.”

She gives much of the credit to Mendoza, who has been on the job about six years. “Her phone ear is amazing…She was able to pick up on the background noise and exactly what the guy was saying,” Molander said.

   

“Our job is to get a location to send help and that’s what we’re working fervently on,” said Mendoza. “I was listening to pertinent information: if there were weapons, if there were threats, if there was anything, we could prepare our officers to be better equipped in entering a situation to deescalate as safely and as fast as possible.”

911 CALL OPERATORS

She admits it’s a challenging job and the key is to utilize as many resources as you can.

“Is it always nerve wracking? Absolutely,” Mendoza said. “But that’s what makes the job so inspiring. You want to do better. You want to get the victim help and you want to get it as fast as possible…To have a resource like RapidSOS is huge. Otherwise, without narrowing down a location, it’s a broad area check.”

“The industry we work in is really challenging because we’re only as good as the resources we have and the information we ascertain. And it’s hard to walk away when you don’t know, or the outcomes are not as ideal as we want them to be. In this situation, we were very fortunate to make contact and to help and assist as much as we could….You do the best you can with what you’re given and you work through it with your peers on how to cope if it doesn’t end up so well. You take that experience and you utilize what you’ve learned and apply it to the next call.”