A pair of AirPods are back in the hands of their rightful owner after they went missing at the gym, according to a now-viral TikTok.
TikTok creator Gabriel (@gabriel4j) noticed his AirPods missing, so he tracked them (via an iPhone feature) to a home nearby. “Our AirPods got stolen at Planet Fitness and we tracked the location,” he wrote in overlay text on the video.
“It was an older lady who answered the door,” the overlay text continues. “So I started to question myself.”
In the video, which now has 2.1 million views, he explains the situation to the person who answered the door. The lady gets her son, who happens to be someone Gabriel recognized from the gym that day.
The TikToker says that he doesn’t want to press charges, he just wants his AirPods back.
Although the boy denies he took anything, his mom tells Gabriel, “Don’t worry he’s going to get them for you.”
Many viewers lauded the mom’s handling of the situation.
“I could imagine how embarrassed the mom was,” one commenter wrote on the video.
“good mom …by not letting him get away with it,” another added.
“The lady is my hero,” a third wrote.
While some in the comments said the TikTok user was “cheap” for driving all the way to another person’s house to get his AirPods back, those people were quickly criticized by others.
“Everyone’s saying it’s cheap?? They are $150. I make 15-60k a month and even I’d be tracking them down,” one person wrote.
“How y’all calling him cheap.. but somebody STOLE his stuff? … How is he the cheap one?” another questioned.
“PSA: just because someone has nice things doesn’t mean they have the money to replace them when STOLEN,” another pointed out.
Gabriel uploaded a part two. In the video, the boy walks outside with two pairs of AirPods in his hand. He aims to explain the possible mix-up, telling Gabriel, “See I have the same ones.” The boy says he thought he dropped his AirPods.
While Gabriel acts cool in the video, he wrote via text overlay, “Our AirPods were in our locker hidden in the shoes with socks over them.”
Update Jan. 24 4:30pm CT: When reached for comment, Gabriel told the Daily Dot that he and his friend forgot their locks to lock up their possessions. “My friend puts his AirPods in his shoes and then puts socks in his shoes covering his AirPods,” he said.
He said the AirPods were missing when they returned to collect their things and that his friend started tracking them. “I had an adrenaline rush because I really wanted to get them back and don’t like being stolen from. We rush to my car and start following them. Then the AirPods on the tracker come to a stop and it gives us an address as to where the AirPods are at. So we arrive to the house to make sure no one leaves and we call the cops and sit there,” he said.
He said that they “called the cops because we didn’t know who had my friends AirPods at the time and we were not sure if they had any weapons.” He said that while the cops couldn’t do much, they waited outside for “protection.”
He said the son was someone he spoke to in the locker room and that he worked with the man at one point. “We had about 60-70 people work there so I didn’t really know the guy I just remember seeing his face at work,” he said.
“I felt bad for his mother because she seemed really sweet. I could tell she was trying to raise him right,” Gabriel said.
Gabriel said he did not tell Planet Fitness about the incident.
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