14 DAY TRIAL // Reigh Rockeffeler, also known as Snooks, is a 7-year-old girl who was kidnapped by her father, right during his visitation hours, as he shared custody rights with the mother. After the FBI reported that the man kidnapped his daughter and made a clean escape in an SUV, injuring in the process a social worker whose role was to supervise the visitation, Clark Rockeffeler became Most Wanted in the U.S.
Reigh's mother, although fully confident in the odds of the FBI investigation, also posted a video on YouTube, meant as an appeal to both the kidnapper and the public opinion, and asking for people's help to bring her daughter back home. "I ask you now, please, please bring Snooks back. There has to be a better way for us to solve our differences than this way," the woman told her ex-husband on the video uploaded on YouTube.
The FBI issued a warrant to arrest Clark Rockeffeler for custodial kidnapping, assault, battery and, later on, another one for "unlawful flight to avoid prosecution." Sandra Boss, Reigh's mother, chose not to announce her daughter's disappearance in a traditional press conference, but built her own studio - a sober room, with just a table, and black curtains behind her - to announce her situation to the media and the public.
As a banner on the top of the video announces, Snooks has been found in the meantime, thanks to the way people reacted. The kidnapper's presence was reported to the FBI, which took the measures necessary for his arrest. Besides the banner, the video also displays a link to another video on YouTube, which reports on the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, an 3-year-old English girl who disappeared from a hotel room in Portugal last year.
It seems like YouTube is becoming, day by day, the best place to go to when it comes to problems supposedly solvable with help from the public. For many, making certain videos public comes more from the need for empathy than from a true belief that making your situation known to the world can actually solve whatever problem you might be tackling.