A parent’s worst nightmare became a terrifying reality when a Los Angeles father caught his 12-year-old daughter about to get into a truck with a stranger she had met online. “Everybody tells me I’m overprotective, but apparently I’m under-protective,” father Tim LeBlanc said in an interview with CBS Los Angeles.
Earlier in the summer, Tim was up at around 2 am in the morning and noticed that his 12-year-old daughter was not in her bedroom and that her bedroom window was cracked open. Frightened as to what might have happened to her, he and his older son began scouring the neighborhood to try and find her. Luckily they found her, just moments before she was about to step into the truck with a an unknown man.
Tim pulled the man out of the vehicle and knocked the man to the ground. He quickly took a photo of the man’s face and held the man until police arrived. It turns out the man had pretended to be a 15-year-old boy and set up a fake profiles online. He had been speaking sexually to Tim’s daughter and sending her indecent photos of himself and lured the teen into meeting him.
Tim says the man had not only lied to his daughter about his age, but had tried to convince him he was a teen. In reality the man is 27. Police arrested the man on charges of meeting up with a child with intentions to commit a sex act and sending harmful matter to a minor.
Tim is relieved to have saved his daughter and is convinced that he would not have a daughter if he hadn’t found her. “What I’ve gained from my interaction with this guy is I don’t think she would’ve ever came home alive,” he said. Tim has since prohibited his daughter from using social media sites and is sending out a warning to other parents that if it could happen to him, it could happen to them. A social experiment based around the exact same kind of situation recently went viral, and shows exactly how easy it is for sexual predators to lure young girls. The fact that this incident actually happened makes it all the more frightening!
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