Dating apps can be an adventure. And in DeKalb County last week, a meeting on the dating app Tinder led to a kidnapping arrest and a mother-daughter reunion, Channel 2 Action News reported.
The situation began when a woman approached two police officers while they were eating lunch in Lithonia, according to the station. She told them that a man she met on the app had kidnapped a girl, the station reported.
“She just checked his name to find out about this guy,” Capt. Donnie James of the DeKalb Police Department said, “and that warrant popped up and it just so happened when she did that, there was a group of officers in front of her.”
The woman, who was not identified, told Channel 2 via telephone that the man said his name was Teddy James, but that name didn’t show up in her online search.
However, when she searched his daughter’s name, she found news articles that said his name was Nathaniel James and that he was wanted in Texas for kidnapping his daughter, according to Channel 2.
“Because he wanted to be around me and my daughter,” the woman said, “and I don’t know, he could be a pedophile. I didn’t know anything about him.”
Using the man’s cell phone, DeKalb authorities traced him to a hotel in Alpharetta, where he was arrested Friday.
His daughter and her mother were reunited the same day. It wasn’t immediately clear if the daughter was with the man when he was arrested.
The woman also had some words about online dating.
“Any time I’m dating somebody,” she said, “I find a digital footprint.”
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