A Florida mother had a scare after finding an AirTag in her son’s shoe in what she called “every mother’s worst nightmare,” according to a report.
Jackie Giurleo realized her son was being tracked through the device, but a subsequent investigation revealed a bizarre mix-up, Fox 35 reported.
Giurleo told the outlet that she did not own any AirTags when she began getting the alerts of places her son had been at a Christmas parade on Satellite Beach.
She searched through all of her son’s clothing and toys, and said her “heart dropped” when she found the device in a quarter-sized hole bored into her son’s shoe. She said it had been tracking him for nearly a month.
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Seven-year-old Aidan told reporters that although he “[goes] a lot of places,” he never felt the AirTag in his travels.
Panicked, Giurleo brought the device to the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office, where deputies subpoenaed Apple to get the address of the person who owned the offending tracking device. The answer brought them outside state lines.
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“Luckily, it just turned into a happy coincidence of a tale of two moms,” Giurleo told Fox 35.
Her son had taken off his shoes at a Christmas parade bounce house. Apparently, he accidentally switched shoes with another boy.
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“I can remember that I saw one of the kids had the same shoes as me, and I think we put them in the same places, and then we just swapped,” Aidan told Fox 35. “I took his, and he took mine.”
The other child was visiting Florida from his home in Oklahoma on vacation. His parents had attached an AirTag to the inside of their son’s shoe to track him in the case of an emergency. They were the ones “tracking” the Florida boy, but had no clue why or how, Giurleo said.
The mother was relieved that the AirTag mystery was a misunderstanding rather than something more insidious.
“We were really lucky that we had a happy ending,” the mom said, according to Fox 35.
Giurleo said that, after all this, she learned more than she lost and just might use AirTags herself at theme parks or other crowded places.
“We have never had AirTags,” she said. “I knew about them with luggage and keys and things like that – I never thought about them when it came to tracking your kids.”
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