Bad idea of the day

[Rain Man]

A couple of nights ago I got an Amber Alert on my phone.

Now, most amber alerts are pretty useless because it's some dude who's mad that he can't take his kid to roller derby, so he grabs them and runs. But this one caught my eye.

It was reported that a truck had been stolen, and a 13 year-old girl had been inside when it happened. Police then found the truck abandoned, but the thief and the girl had not been located. It happened 100+ miles away from me, so I wasn't likely to spot the criminal, but I still thought to myself, "Yeah, this is the type of thing that an Amber Alert is good for."

I thought about it today and wondered what happened, so I google-sleuthed.

Apparently the dude whose truck was stolen wanted to create some law enforcement urgency to get his truck back, so he told them that his 13 year-old cousin was in the vehicle and had been kidnapped. Law enforcement found the truck pretty quickly and then probably reacted more strongly than the thief would have expected. As it turned out, the cousin was never in the truck and was just hanging out at home the whole time.

The truck owner is really lucky that this didn't escalate more than it did. But I bet the truck thief is never going to steal a truck again.

https://www.kktv.com/2024/10/17/poli...o-amber-alert/