(WSVN) - A 911 dispatcher’s quick thinking helped save a woman who had been abducted in North Carolina.
Fox 8 reports that Tim Medlin took the emergency call around 4 a.m. Saturday from a woman who said she had been kidnapped from Raleigh and locked in the trunk of a car.
Medlin was able to track the car’s movements on a highway thanks to the phone’s GPS, but then the call was lost.
The woman did not answer the phone when Medlin tried to call her back, so he came up with an unorthodox solution. Since dispatchers have a cell phone to use in case land lines go down, Medlin used the phone to text the woman’s number.
“I sent a simple text, ‘can you text?'” he said. “I got a response back, ‘yes,’ and almost immediately got another response back, ‘help me.'”
Through text messages, the woman told Medlin that she knew the man who was driving, and believed he was heading to an address in Fayetteville. Dispatchers sent local police the address, and Nicholas Mattevi was quickly arrested.
Mattevi now faces charges of false imprisonment. It is unclear if he has an attorney.
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