A concerned mother recently went viral on TikTok after sharing the story of how a man followed her and her two children while she shopped at Walmart.
Brooke (@brookesobasic) received over 961,000 views on her video by Tuesday morning. She posted her video to spread awareness to others about what to do if you are being followed.
In the video, Brooke explains she saw a man with a clipboard in the baby aisle. “He’s writing stuff down,” she says. “I’m thinking he’s gonna have me sign a petition or sign up for like an Obama phone, some free Wi-Fi—I don’t know.”
“Thankfully, he didn’t approach me, so I walked the other direction,” she adds.
Brooke finds the man walking in the opposite direction, and he is still writing stuff down. “I’m thinking, that’s kind of weird,” she says. “But it’s Walmart, so what can I expect?”
Brooke says she then walked into the little girls’ underwear section and saw him again.
“Now I know he’s weird,” she says, “because this is a little girl panty aisle, he’s by himself, and he’s not grabbing anything.” Brooke leaves the aisle without grabbing anything. She says she recalled a tip she heard when she was younger: “If you feel like somebody’s following you … make four right turns.”
As she begins to make her four right turns, she notices that the man is definitely trying to track her. “My stomach starts hurting, and my intuition is going, and I start to fart,” she says.
“This is embarrassing, but it also works to my advantage. I learned when I was a kid that if someone’s trying to kidnap you, you need to be disgusting.”
Brooke notices the man still following her and her children around the store. “I’m so worried because I’m by myself with my two little kids. How am I going to protect us?” She adds that her phone had no service in the store, but she pretended to call the police anyway.
“I can also see the lady who is running the self-checkout area, and I start putting my hand up and calling for her,” she says. “That’s when he kind of glances at me and looks forward.”
“I yell out to her and say that I think I’m being followed right now,” she adds.
Brooke says two older veterans there overheard what she said: “They didn’t say anything to me, but I know that they were kind of watching out for me.”
After checkout, the veterans and a Walmart employee found her and offered to walk her to her car. Brooke says a police officer told her many people had been trafficked from her local Walmart.
“Why are these encounters becoming our new normal?” she asks.
Brooke did not respond to a request for comment from the Daily Dot via TikTok comment. She deleted her video Tuesday afternoon, shortly after the Daily Dot reached out.
The Daily Dot also contacted Walmart via email and a media relations contact form for further information.
