A Special Experience

Story time:

I joined forces with 3 other strangers to rescue another stranger from suicide last night.

One of our group found that one of his Twitter followers had posted a suicide note and he started asking for help in locating him. We had literally nothing more to go on than an obscure twitter handle, a bird, a Walmart prescription bottle (no info visible), a face pic, and a possible state name.

Other than those 5 small details this guy was almost completely invisible online. Our group spent 6 hours combing through his tweets, forum posts and any other website on the internet showing his obscure username. Finally, we narrowed down part of his real name, his city, and a business he worked with - which also helped us narrow down the pharmacy he used for the prescription - and were able to contact his local police to do a wellness check.

The police were a bit suspicious of our call at first, they kept asking how we knew the guy at risk, and how we "knew" we were calling the right city. They definitely didn't know what to think of the fact that we were all strangers to each other, even to the guy we were trying to find, and that we were scattered all over the country.

We provided the police with the little information we had pulled together (it was awesome that they took our call seriously) and they actually managed to locate him and take him to the hospital!

The police were lucky enough to get there before he managed to follow through with his attempt.

As you can imagine, this was definitely an incredible experience for us!

There's more to say, and maybe soon I'll be able to take some to explain a little more.