“We noticed notes falling from my neighbors 2nd floor window saying ‘911’,” begins a dramatic trio of TikToks, documenting an apparent case of a woman being kept captive in someone’s house.
Posted by TikToker @sydmasterflsh, the first video begins with the TikToker and her neighbors picking up a handful of notes from outside the house next door. Someone in the background says the notes came from a woman “locked in the bedroom” upstairs. At this point the police are already on the scene, visible as the TikToker films a note reading, “Call 911. I’m being held captive. No electric, food, or my medications. Very ill.”
This was @sydmasterflsh’s first video on TikTok, and once it went viral (6.7 million views and counting), some commenters predictably voiced their doubts about the kidnapping being a hoax. So in her second update, @sydmasterflsh shared more context on the alleged crime.
Supposedly her upstairs neighbors noticed the notes first, and when the next-door homeowner left his house, they were able to speak through the window to the woman who’d written the notes. They called the police, and while they waited for the police to arrive, the woman told them that she’d been held captive for five days. But by the time the police showed up, other people in the house had already let the woman out.
“This is not the first time this has happened,” said the TikToker, explaining that the house is rented out by the room, and is home to a lot of drug-users. According to her, the cops didn’t believe the woman’s story when they arrived, and decided she was “lying” and probably high. “It has happened multiple times with multiple women,” the TikToker added. “I don’t believe she’s lying for a second.”
Some people clearly still weren’t convinced because @sydmasterflsh posted a third update clarifying some further details, including the way she reacted to the notes during her initial video.
“Why were we being so loud?” she asks. “That clip of us reading the notes and being loud, that did not happen until after the police came, got her and left… We knew what was going on because we were literally talking to the woman in the window.” So the first video doesn’t show her discovering the notes, it’s just her reading the messages on camera. She described herself as “kind of in shock” at the time.
While TikTok is home to plenty of hoaxes (not to mention true crime fanatics), this TikToker’s updates frame the story as a depressingly plausible situation, where local police disbelieved the victim of an alleged crime because they believed she was a drug-user or sex worker.
It’s unclear where this video took place, but we’ve reached out to @sydmasterflsh.
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