Man Claims To Be Calling From Inside Car Trunk
POSTED: 2:30 pm EDT June 26, 2006
LAKELAND, Fla. -- Central Florida detectives continue to seek four men and a tan four-door Honda even as they question the authenticity of a frantic 911 call from a man who said he was snatched and thrown in a trunk.
"We're treating it as if it's real because we can't afford not to," Polk County Sheriff's spokeswoman Carrie Rodgers said. "But there are still a lot of things that don't add up."
The breathless man, who said his name is Michael James or Jeans, told a 911 dispatcher early Saturday he was calling from a cell phone he found in the car's trunk.
"Praise God I found this phone," the man told the 911 operator. "Please, please, help me please! ... I'm a God-fearing man, I never hurt anyone."
The eight-minute call ended with a scream.
CALLER: "They're opening it."
OPERATOR: "They're opening the trunk? Michael, are you still there?"
CALLER: (Screams)
OPERATOR: "Hello? Hello? I just lost him. They stopped and they opened the trunk."
"Obviously sounded like he was fearing for his life," Rodgers said. "I don't think somebody could fake that level of panic."
Detectives said the call sounds genuine, but not everything in the caller's story adds up. The phone the man claimed to have found in the trunk had been deactivated years ago. Deactivated phones can still call 911, but detectives wondered how it could remain charged so long after service was cut off.
No one matching either name was known to be living in the Lakeland area, authorities said. But the man mentioned in the call that he had just moved to the area.
"I just moved down here from Georgia," he said. I just moved like three weeks ago. I don't know anybody. I don't have any enemies."
The agency released a video of four men who bought gas for a tan Honda at a convenience store about two hours before the man called 911. The men are described as persons of interest.
Two weeks ago, the U.S. Coast Guard faced a similar dilemma when a boater radioed in a distress call that he was sinking 3 miles off Boynton Beach.
http://www.courttv.com/news/2006/0613/hoax_ap.htmlListen to the USGS recording here ---> http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/mplayer/m/3844The caller said he had nine people on board, but a search turned up no signs of the boat, nor the missing boaters. Authorities were unable to confirm the caller's identity and found no records of the boat. A search was suspended after 24 hours with no sign of wreckage or the boaters.
Polk County media:
http://www.polksheriff.org/briefings/news/new/Information%20Sought%20in%20Apparent%20Abduction.pdfVideo From the Circle K:
http://www.polksheriff.org/briefings/news/new/Circle%20K%20video.avi
