The Stone Mountain Park police department is investigating after a Cumming woman may have foiled an attempted human trafficking during holiday fireworks Saturday evening.
Kelly Pittman and her family were visiting the park for a day of fun and fireworks. But when rain began to fall and people on the lawn started to scatter, she noticed a 3-year-old boy all by himself.
“My instinct was like I have to help this kid. There’s no way I’m just going to let him keep walking past me alone,” she tells WSB’s Sandra Parrish.
She asked him what his mother’s name was and the two began searching for her. That’s when a woman, who looked to be a different ethnicity, got her attention.
“She’s just waving her arm and she’s like, ‘Here, over here. He’s mine’.”
Initially relieved to have found her, Pittman’s instincts told her something wasn’t right.
“She’s on the phone the whole time, and I thought that was really weird,” says Pittman.
She says the woman also didn’t seem concerned that her child had been missing. When Pittman turned to the boy to ask if that was his mother, he shook his head “no”.
“I just got chills down my whole body. I just couldn’t believe this lady,” says Pittman.
Pittman took the boy in the opposite direction and found a tent with park rangers who eventually learned the child’s actual mother was at another location desperately looking for him. Pittman waited for what would be a tearful reunion between the two and breathed a sigh of relief.
“It was going to be a happy ending, but it was very scary,” she says.
Pittman says when she reunited with her own family, they looked for the suspect woman but couldn’t find her.
Park spokesman John Bankhead commends Pittman for her actions.
“This person did the right thing in making sure to ask the child if… the lady claiming to be the mother was, in fact, the mother—which it turned out was not the case,” he says.
Bankhead says while police are looking into Pittman’s claims, the park doesn’t have a history of human trafficking cases.
“We have police officers that are patrolling the area. You just have to take precautions when you have your kids in a large crowd like that,” he says.
Pittman is now trying to get the warning out to parents over social media. Her account of what happened has been shared over 10,000 times on Facebook.
“I shared it because I do believe it’s really important and because it could have been me. This could have just been my boy, and I think a lot of times parents sometimes see this on the news and think it isn’t really happening here. But it is. It’s everywhere,” she says.