Photo: @nottheworstmom - TikTok
She ignored three pit bulls in the search from her missing child.
By NyRee Ausler — Written on May 08, 2023
As a mother, you want to protect your child from all the evils in the world. You want them to be accepted by their peers, protected and looked after when you are not around, and you want them to feel safe and secure, even when they are in the wrong. But one mother’s reaction to her inability to reach her daughter by phone might be extreme to some, while perfectly logical to others.
In a TikTok video, a mom says she broke into a stranger's house to find her daughter.
The TikToker, Sara Buckley, started the video by saying, “Well, it’s official. I’m insane. I’m going to tell you the most unhinged mother thing I have ever done in my life.” She told viewers that her family doesn’t do sleepovers because she doesn’t trust anybody with her kids. Her daughter is in Junior High School and has been to less than ten sleepovers in her life, with two of them occurring in the prior month.
After the last sleepover at a friend’s house, she was set to pick her daughter up around noon for a hair appointment that the girl had really been looking forward to. Ten minutes before she was scheduled to arrive, she texted her daughter and let her know she was on the way but got no response.
Buckley didn’t think much of it and texted again when she got to her daughter’s friend's house to let her know she was outside waiting. Again, she got no response to the text or subsequent calls but checked her kid's location and confirmed she was at the address.
The worried mom then knocked on the front door and could hear someone saying “hello” from inside repeatedly, but not coming to the door.
She continued to knock for five additional minutes before a neighbor approached to see what was going on. Skeptical of the stranger pounding on the door, he asked Buckley if she even knew who lived at the home and she was too frantic to recall the names. After giving him more information, he was less cautious and said he had not seen the neighbors and that their cars weren’t home.
After spending more time knocking but still hearing a voice responding from behind the door. Buckley called her husband for “backup,” ran home to pick him up, and returned to the house she knew her daughter was in. They both continued knocking to no avail, prompting her to call the police for assistance. Meanwhile, Buckley’s husband canvassed the neighborhood trying to gather information on the people in the home.
The 911 operator told the frustrated mother that it was a non-emergency and put her on hold for five minutes while he transferred her to a person who would set up a ‘welfare check’ on her daughter. While holding, it dawned on Buckley that the mysterious voice she heard from behind the door was actually a parrot talking, a detail that she calls “the most unnecessarily ridiculous part of the story.”
As she hung up, redialed 911, and waited on the phone, her husband walked around the home yelling his daughter’s name, checked under everything on the front porch for a spare key before eventually deciding to pull out the water hose at the house and began to spray the upstairs windows. He wanted to get the residents’ attention but didn’t want to use anything that might break a window.
The realization that the girl hadn’t been in contact for hours and her boyfriend didn’t know where she was only ramped up the worry.
With the 911 operator advising that the response would take 30 minutes, the scared parents decided to take matters into their own hands. Buckley jumped the fence into the backyard, unconcerned about the two pit bulls who were back there. Luckily the back door was unlocked because had it not been, the protective parent says she would have launched a brick through the window.
Once inside the home, Buckley says, “Never in my life have I cared less for my physical safety.” This is a good thing since there was another pit bull hanging out there, although inside of a crate.
Buckley and her husband ran upstairs and “started bursting into bedrooms and clearing them like the swat team” before finding their daughter safe and sound, sleeping peacefully in her friend’s room with two other teens. The confused girls were awakened by the parents standing over them. The ashamed dad rushed out of the room while Buckley stayed and yelled at them.
Relieved that her daughter was “still alive” Buckley told her to get her belongings through tears, and they left out the front door as the parrot kept saying “hello” to anyone in the vicinity.
In that video, there was no indication of how the parents of their daughter’s friend reacted to her busting into their home, but viewers really wanted an update, so Buckley shared a part two video.
In that update, she shared that unbeknownst to her, the woman whose house she had ‘broken into’ had been following her for some time and had seen her initial upload about the situation.
The woman thanked her for not breaking the windows at her home and didn’t seem to be upset about the incident. But Buckley jokingly said she was “faking her death and moving out of the country” and clarified that she doesn’t believe the parents did anything wrong in the situation. In the end, many parents could relate to risking it all to make sure their child is safe.
NyRee Ausler is a writer from Seattle, Washington. She covers lifestyle, relationship, and human-interest stories that readers can relate to and that bring social issues to the forefront for discussion.