Cell phone carriers always add on ridiculous services. $5 here, $10 there, but one service may not be so terrible after all. A family monitoring plan through their carrier alerted them that their daughter was in trouble. This service helped them locate their daughter, and give them peace of mind.
“When I got the notification on the phone I wasn’t 100 percent sure really what it was. It just said that Ashlyn had dialed 911,” said Shannon Flegel, the girl’s mother.
Flegel says she had just gotten to work the morning of July 19 when she got that text. She was puzzled, but when her 12-year-old daughter Ashlyn didn’t answer, she called 911.
“I said I’m not sure this is really an emergency, but I got this really strange text and then they took my information, and they took her information and then they put me on hold. And then they told me they would have an officer come pick me up,” Shannon Flegel said.
Shannon Flegel quickly pieced together the facts. Ashlyn was hit by a car just a block from their home on the way to summer school. “She was always coming and going. She was always with her friends,” said Tony Flegel, the girl’s father.
In less than an hour, Shannon and Tony were by their daughter’s side. “When I arrived at Children’s (Hospital) she had a band on her arm, her name band, and it said Jane Doe. She was my little girl,” Shannon Flegel said.
Both parents thankful for the $5 a month program that they say bought them precious hours with their daughter that would have been lost as authorities tried to identify her. “We still got to say goodbye to her,” Tony Flegel said.
“We got a whole week to love her and tell her how much we loved her and how proud I was of her. That is a gift that I can’t believe that I got,” the child’s mother said.