Trapped for Hours, iPhone App Finally Leads Family to Their Missing Daughter in a Ravine

Macy Smith Hero Find My Friends Credit: Facebook / Macy Smith
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Apple’s Find My Friends app helped lead a family to their daughter who had been stuck in her car in a ravine for seven hours.

Late at night on June 7, teenager Macy Smith missed her curfew and wasn’t answering her phone, The Washington Post reported. As you might expect, her family quickly became worried.

The girl’s mother, Catrina Cramer Alexander, and her family eventually went looking for her. They searched through dense woodlands near Pilot Mountain, North Carolina, guided only by a small blue dot on the Find My Friends app.

That small blue dot eventually led the family to a 25-foot-deep ravine shrouded by trees. There, a set of tire tracks running off the road caught Alexander’s eye.

At the bottom of the embankment, Smith was alive — but had been trapped in her vehicle for nearly seven hours.

“Having that location, if we didn’t have that, we would have never known where to look,” Alexander told WXII.

Earlier that day, Smith had gone to meet a friend. But when she reached the road near Pilot Mountain, heavy rain had made the pavement extremely slick.

According to a Facebook post shared the day after the crash, Smith said that her car hydroplaned and had driven off the road. It flipped three times before coming to a stop in the ravine.

Her left arm was pinned beneath the car and the ground, and her smartphone was nowhere to be found. With no choice but to wait, Smith said that she was comforted by the only thing in reach: a Bible. During the seven hours she was stuck, the teenager said she counted 28 cars that passed her by.

Smith, for her part, had a word of advice for teenagers with privacy concerns. “Sneaking out and being places you don’t want your parents to know about is not worth being trapped under a car for seven hours,” she told ABC.

Apple’s Find My Friends app lets iOS users share their locations with their contacts. First released back in 2014, the platform’s capabilities have since been combined with Find My iPhone in the new Find My app in iOS 13.

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