Hall County Department of Corrections
An Arizona man who kidnapped and sexually assaulted a Utah teen after publicly grooming the 13-year-old online from afar, could have been stopped—if local cops hadn’t made a small but crucial error, and if Twitter officials hadn’t dragged their feet in responding to law enforcement requests, the boy’s parents say.
“He had photos, images of my son, on Twitter. Everybody could see it,” Heather McConney told NBC News. “How do you not see this is a child? If you would have taken 10 seconds to go and look you would have seen it. And if you would have just released the information, we would have been able to find this person.”
The brazen abduction occurred Dec. 26, 2022, amid erratic billionaire Elon Musk’s turbulent takeover of the social media platform. The world’s second-richest man loudly proclaimed the dawn of a new era for Twitter, vowing to eliminate what he claimed was widespread child sex abuse and exploitation happening on the site.