Jennifer DeStefano’s phone rang one afternoon as she climbed out of her car outside the dance studio where her younger daughter Aubrey had a rehearsal. The caller showed up as unknown, and she briefly contemplated not picking up.
But her older daughter, 15-year-old Brianna, was away training for a ski race and DeStefano feared it could be a medical emergency.
“Hello?” she answered on speaker phone as she locked her car and lugged her purse and laptop bag into the studio.
She was greeted by yelling and sobbing.
“Mom! I messed up!” screamed a girl’s voice.
“What did you do?!? What happened?!?” DeStefano asked.
“The voice sounded just like Brie’s, the inflection, everything,” she told CNN. “Then, all of a sudden, I heard a man say, ‘Lay down, put your head back.’ I’m thinking she’s being gurnied off the mountain, which is common in skiing. So I started to panic.”
As the cries for help continued in the background, a deep male voice started firing off commands: “Listen here. I have your daughter. You call the police, you call anybody, I’m gonna pop her something so full of drugs. I’m gonna have my way with her then drop her off in Mexico, and you’re never going to see her again.”
DeStefano froze. Then she ran into the dance studio, shaking and screaming for help. She felt like she was suddenly drowning.
After a chaotic, rapid-fire series of events that included a $1 million ransom demand, a 911 call and a frantic effort to reach Brianna, the “kidnapping” was exposed as a scam. A puzzled Brianna called to tell her mother that she didn’t know what the fuss was about and that everything was fine.
But DeStefano, who lives in Arizona, will never forget those four minutes of terror and confusion — and the eerie sound of that familiar voice.
“A mother knows her child,” she said later. “You can hear your child cry across the building, and you know it’s yours.”
