A tweet for help. I'm Jason Horton. I'm Rebecca Leib. And this is Ghost Town.

On September 30, 2012, the account Kara Olongi 13 sends an ominous, petrifying message into the

Twitter sphere. It said, quote, there is someone in my house, call 911. Today we're talking about the

bizarre kidnapping of Kara Olongi, something that would change the relationship of law enforcement

and Twitter forever. Kara's tweets sparked almost immediate attention, discussed and retweeted

over 32,000 times. Keep in mind, this is 2012. Twitter is much smaller, it's figuring itself out.

And the idea of a hashtag, too, was very new. It was novel. It was powerful.

So this specific situation evolved into a hashtag called hashtag help find Kara. That was

retweeted over 34,000 times. Again, keep in mind, this was 2012. Twitter was panicked by the tweet,

hoping they could figure out Kara's whereabouts and make sure she was okay. But soon the concern

transcended social media. The tweet prompted over 6,000 calls to 911, hoping to begin an investigation

into Kara's disappearance. After that, news media outlets picked up the story and the nation

looked to the tweets origin, Clark, New Jersey, for answers and leadership into the investigation

of the person the nation now knew as Kara Olongi, a 16-year-old who desperately needed help.

Nobody was more stunned or overwhelmed than the small police department of Clark, New Jersey.

Clark Police Chief Alan Sherb said that had not been for Twitter, his department would have

handled this like any other missing juvenile case, a serious but common problem. But with the

attention, the small department felt immense pressure to find the missing teen.

Soon, Clark investigators discovered that someone called for a taxi at Olongi's address

at around the same time her Twitter message was posted. Hours after that, police gained surveillance

footage of Olongi at the local railway train station, carrying a backpack and a large purse.

Police working with the New Jersey Transit Authority reviewed surveillance video and discovered

...