Nothing is scarier than losing track of your child when you are away from home or in a large crowd. Parents and children alike will often panic as they feverishly try to find each other. It can be an excruciating time for everyone involved. Advances in technology, however, have made it easier for us to keep track of our kids with GPS devices and apps for phones and tablets.
For younger children who don't have personal devices, parents have begun to use Apple AirTags to keep track of them, which can bring a lot of comfort. But for one Florida mom, it recently caused panic.
Jacqueline Giurleo, who lives in Satellite Beach, wasn't tracking her son Aidan, but when her phone started alerting her there was an AirTag nearby, she soon realized someone else was. When she found the tag hidden in Aidan's shoe, she immediately went to the police. What happened next is like something out of a movie.
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It all started around Christmas.
In a Facebook post, she explained that she had taken her kids to a Christmas parade, and shortly afterward, she got the first notification that an AirTag was nearby. At first, she didn't think much of it.
"Then we were camping at Disney's Fort Wilderness over New Year's and it started happening again that an Air Tag was with us. I thought it was weird, but again, crowded area maybe [we] were picking up others again," she wrote.
But a visit with her sister freaked her out.
During their visit, an AirTag began to ping on her sister's phone, and when she asked Giurleo about it, the mom became very concerned. She and her husband quickly realized the tracker was somewhere on Aidan and it had been keeping track of his every move, which meant the device's owner also knew exactly where the child was at any given moment.
"You could see Aidan's exact steps – including going to his friend's houses in the neighborhood to see who could play, riding his scooter around, and literally going across the street to get a basketball, as soon as he showed me that picture I knew it was Aidan," she wrote. "You can see from the picture where he went to one house, back tracked, went to another house, went across the street and went around the block. These images have been edited to a smaller size, but all of the images on the app showed the exact addresses in real time."
When she finally found the tag, her heart stopped.
As soon as she realized the AirTag was on her child, she searched and found it meticulously hidden inside his shoe. Police took the shoe for investigation, and she frantically contacted shoe stores in the area to see if the shoes had been sold with AirTags attached. Then, she had a thought.
She explained, "While my Mama heart was going through every emotion you could imagine at that time, we had a thought a few hours later about what if it was another Mom who was tracking her kid, and accidentally switched shoes?"
Thankfully, that's all it was.
The AirTag was, in fact, put into the shoe by another parent, and when Aidan was playing in a bounce house at the Christmas parade, he and the other child accidentally switched their shoes. For nearly a month, a family from Oklahoma who had been visiting Florida had been tracking Aidan, who was wearing their son's shoes.
"I can remember that I saw one of the kids had the same shoes as me, and I think we put them in the same places, and then we just swapped," Aidan told Fox 35.
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Aidan's mom is relieved.
She concluded her post with a shout-out to Apple, gratitude for great technology, and a word of caution to other parents.
"These things can be a great benefit – I can see how they would be a great idea for your kids for theme park days, camping trips, letting them roam around the neighborhood, etc. They are genius if YOU are the one tracking your kid If it's not you, not so much Hope this helps some other Mama's," she wrote.
