Life-saving US email to Sweden
p2p news / p2pnet: An extraordinary chain of online messages, from a girl in a small Swedish town to a young man in America and then to a Stockholm-based news site has led to the emergency services rescuing a girl who had overdosed on painkillers,” says an equally extraordinary post on Sweden`s The Local.
A couple of weeks ago, staff were packing it in for the day and as managing director Paul Rapacioli was shutting down his computer, he received an email with, Please read and take seriously in the subject box, says the story.
Despite the fact it looked as if it could have been spam, Rapacioli read it and saw it came from a young man in the US who, moments before, had been chatting online to a girl in Sweden.
The email contained a transcript of the conversation, in which the girl said she had taken an overdose of painkillers, says The Local.
It also had the girl’s name and address. The guy who sent the email obviously didn’t speak Swedish and said he didn’t know who else to contact in Sweden. He asked if we could help, perhaps by contacting the police in the area,” says Rapacioli, who admits he still wasn`t sure the message was for real. But better safe than sorry, so he contacted the emergency services who in turn notified the police who immediately sent a unit to the girl’s apartment.
The following day, police in the town west of Stockholm confirmed that she had been taken directly to the local hospital’s casualty ward, says The Local, going on to quote police spokesman Ulf Palm as saying, “She was very poorly when we found her and an ambulance took her to hospital.
Palm said that the process which led to the report was “incredible” and that he`d never heard of anything like that before.
The girl mentioned in this article is now out of intensive care and is recovering in hospital, says The Local, adding:
At her request her identity has not been revealed.
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See:-
The Local – Email from US rescues Swedish girl, October 20, 2005
October 21st, 2005 at 4:48 pm
This is great. It’s good to hear a story like this
October 21st, 2005 at 6:54 pm
Twice I have seen this happen but not with email.
Once on a forum, the other on a p2p. Both played simularly but in different areas. Sucide potential has change of heart after the commitment and pleas for help from a stranger on the internet. Shortly after there is no contact. Both times the local police were contacted through a chain of events that led to a local phone call from someone in the area; alerted by message from the internet. It goes to show that it is a small world and people still care.
That is quite different from the cartels image that cyberspace is filled with noncaring pirates that are out for number one. This is another of those things that rarely ever make it to the lamestream media.
October 22nd, 2005 at 12:43 am
If this had happened with persons solely in the USA, the heroic young man would have been arrested for being a pedophile and attempting to seduce the young girl by encouraging her to take an overdose of medication.
Yes, I’m cynical and jaded, but that’s the mentality of things here these days.
March 27th, 2007 at 9:25 am
Cant say any thing about it.