Girl in trouble

Around 1:30 AM this poor girl rings the doorbell. I'm at work monitoring my system remotely as like a central station for my wife who's home and sleeping. Of course the first instinct is the person is looking for trouble at this hour. My wife's safety is paramount and I call her and tell her not to answer the door. However looking back at the footage this girl is in obvious distress, seemingly fleeing from something not good. After a quick playback of this incident I called 911 and the cops responded. She has not been seen since. This young girl is gonna haunt me. I watch her face and my heart sinks every time. I just want to help her and at the time, it just wasn't able to be seen for what it was. It was a kid in trouble, not making trouble. I did all I could do in the moment. Only in hindsight could it be ascertained that this kid was in a bad spot. I have all footage documented and will send off a perfect ID picture of her to PD. I can only pray there is a good outcome to this one.

Every time I think I'll let my ptz go and install a fixed camera, I'm glad I haven't. I'm still running analog. I have a whole new killer megapixel system to install but I haven't gotten to it yet. This is an example of how a ptz is powerful. My door camera only got the back of this girl. There would have been zero ID of her. Only the ptz could get it and only because I was at the controls at the right moment. The shit that happens, good grief. Hope she's ok somewhere.

You made the only call you could for your family.
Hopefully she is fine.

That's really odd. She doesn't seem to be running away from someone who might be following her. That is, never appears to look behind or to see if anyone's out there and isn't hiding. But then runs full tilt to the other house and seems confused when she gets there. Then off running down the road again when there appear to be other houses closer that she could have gone to. Drugged out? Maybe in a car accident somewhere nearby and in shock?

I thought maybe drugged but she looks lucid to me. I also saw nothing chasing her, be it car or person. The realization that no one is likely to answer the door to help you can put you in a panic, I would think. It could have been a domestic abuse case too, where she got out and was looking for immediate help. John gone wrong? Lots of variables, no real clue what was going on. I keep talking myself into a good place but when I look at that girl all I see is a petrified kid in need of help and I can't reach through a camera to do it. We live in a world of distrust first. Sometimes the video shows a different tale than crime. This one is a first on my cameras. All I can do is figure if she was fleeing a bad situation she was free and out of it. If she knows the area she knew it wouldn't be too far to a public area, gas station and whatnot. I'm hopeful she at least made it to safety.

Btw when she ducked down she really threw me because she just seemed to disappear. My ptz has a return to position setting after 30 seconds idle and that can be heard whizzing around when it does that. I believe that spooked her into ducking down.

You made the right call. Don't beat yourself up.
Drug induced paranoia, would be my guess.

Hard to say what she was up to. You did the right thing.

Your wife comes first. That poor girl was definitely in need of help of some kind but your wife wasn't the person to give it to her while alone at 1:30 am. I think if she was in an emergency situation and not impaired she would 1), not have been possibly spooked by the noise of the PTZ, and 2) have knocked on another neighbour's door immediately after running from yours. My guess is that she was either in some kind of mental health emergency or really spaced out on drugs. I wouldn't want to let someone having either of those issues into my home alone with my wife for any amount of time, let alone waking her from a dead sleep at that time of night. You did the right thing for you and your wife.

Shockwave199 said:

Btw when she ducked down she really threw me because she just seemed to disappear. My ptz has a return to position setting after 30 seconds idle and that can be heard whizzing around when it does that. I believe that spooked her into ducking down.

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Yeah, I was wondering where she went too. lol

The other thing that seemed strange to me was that, as far as we saw anyway, she just knocked once and then stood there waiting patiently. If I'm in a situation where I'm running up and knocking on a stranger's door in the middle of the night for some important reason, then I'm going to be KNOCKING and trying to get some attention. At worst they call the cops and it's still mission accomplished. As long as they don't come out and just shoot my ass at least. ; )

She rang the doorbell a couple times. Never knocked. Hopefully it ended well. Really my main concern is that it ended well for the people I care about in the house. My system worked and it was handled as best it could be.

That looked like drug induced panic, about 2003 I had a doorbell ringer myself and a young girl was VERY incoherent, she said she lost her best friend around my house. I live 300' from the road and a rural area and I admit my heart was pounding when she rang the bell. I got a flashlight and looked around the yard and could not find her friend, she told me she was 16 and her and her friend took LSD and smoked weed. I called my sister who lives a mile up the road and asked her to help me out (she is a R.N.) she called the cops but another neighbor beat her to it because this girl was ringing doorbells up and down the street. Turns out that there was a bush party in the woods with about 60 or so youths and some of them were tripping. The cops came to my house but instead of calling EMS to evaluate her, they called her Father, I thought that was kinda weird. He came and got her, found out a few weeks later that she was a local politicians grand daughter from the next town over.

It's a simple fact that good-hearted, well-intentioned attempts to help drug users often end up with the "helper" getting taken advantage of, victimized, etc. Sorry to say that I've seen this happen among some of my own relatives. My firm position with druggies is to completely detach and not get involved with their toxic, chaotic existence in any way, shape or form. Sounds harsh ... but that's the only response many of them actually understand or respect.

JohnnyC, I remember you from the other forum back in the day. It was your generous sharing of details of your system + the trials and tribulations you experienced that inspired me to secure my own property, too. Thanks!

You did everything right and made an excellent judgment call. Protect family/wife first. You responsibly monitored her with the PTZ. Wouldn't subject a sleepy wife to that situation - I wouldn't even subject a fully awake and fully armed ME to that situation. I know that's not a neighborly thought... and no apologies.