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By Chris O’Toole

In the vast and nearly untraceable world of cyberspace, it’s difficult to be the father of a teenage daughter. Gone are the days where children were free to roam outside and play night games or be gone from the house for hours on end without the parents worrying about what might happen to them. Even in the protective realm of Facebook, which is a more certain and valid website than a chat room with anonymous names and no verifications, I discovered my child was in danger. Fortunately, the GPS tracker was there to make my harrowing account a cautionary tale and not headline news.

My daughter, let’s call her “Kate” for privacy purposes, is normally a very responsible and honest 16-year-old. To this day, she still has not given me reason to distrust her. I, as the father of a daughter without a wife to assist me, care more for my Kate than words can describe. I trust her, but I have been unable to trust the world with so many perilous events taking place in the recent past. Therefore, I turned to the security of a GPS tracker and purchased RMT’s Rover in the hope that it would never have to play a real role in my life.

One day, my Kate was unusually coy with me. She said that she was going over to a friend’s house. I demanded to know whose house it was. After the typical “overprotective parent-annoyed teenager” interchange, she told me that it was the house of a guy that she had met online and that her other friends would be there. I let her go, and if not for this tracking system, it may have been the last time I saw her.

Call it a parent’s intuition or a father’s paranoia, but I glanced at my laptop to see the address that she had arrived at and I sped there immediately. To my relief, she went to the door and a boy her age answered the door. I was about to start my car and pull away when I noticed that the boy left the house.

My confused daughter stood on the door step of the rather dilapidated house, only to be yanked into the house by a heavy set 30-year-old male. No one heard her scream. No one saw her being victimized, except her father. I rushed into the house immediately, rescued my daughter, and that man is now behind bars for 25 years. Apparently, he had operated under a false profile and his accomplices had set up falsified accounts in the identities of Kate’s friends. The RMT Rover GPS tracker was the hero that saved my beautiful daughter.