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Friends Use iPhone App To Find Missing Student Jimmy Hubert

By Lindsay McCane
Published on: 07:19 PST, Oct 21, 2015

A missing college student was found hurt, but alive, largely due to his friends who used a iPhone app to locate him.

Jimmy Hubert, an engineering student at Georgia Institute of Technology, was last seen on Friday, October 16, leaving a party at the The Foundry at Puritan Mill in Atlanta just after 11:00 p.m. The search for Jimmy was supposed to resume on Monday at 10:00 a.m., but his friends couldn’t wait that long, and took the matters into their own hands. They worked throughout the whole weekend, using the tracking device on Hubert’s date’s iPhone (he had unintentionally left the party with her phone) to pinpoint his location.

“It all relates back to the fact that Jimmy had his date’s phone in his pocket at the event,” Hubert’s friend Christian Battaglia told ABC News.

Hubert’s date had enabled the Find My iPhone app on her phone, and Jimmy’s friends were able to take a screenshot of the phone’s last known ping, or location, before the phone lost its charge. Emma Jeffery, a friend of Hubert, said she went searching for him based on the phone’s last ping, and spotted him just as they were about to give up hope. Jimmy was found faced down in a ditch seven miles from the campus and a few blocks from a commuter rail station.

“We were about to turn around and then I said there was a shaded area you know over in the ditch and I said ‘What’s that?’ and then sure enough it was Jimmy,” she recalled. “I thought he was gone,” Jeffrey continued.

“He was face down, laying down, face down, his head was turned to the side, his eyes were open, he wasn’t speaking at first.”

Alexandra Vande Linde said Hubert was very confused and disoriented when he finally spoke. He didn’t know where he was and asked them if he was missing. He was covered in bruises and his clothes were torn. He told his friends that a group of men had beat him.

“He opened his eyes and then he just said ‘Where am I? Am I missing,’ ” Linde said.

Hubert was then transported to Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta to receive medical treatment. Christian Battaglia, another one of Jimmy’s friends, said he visited Jimmy in the hospital. He said he was having trouble breathing but was able to “wiggle all of his fingers and toes.” Jimmy was being treated for a broken vertebrae, broken ribs, a punctured lung and cerebral hemorrhaging in the emergency room.

“[Hubert’s rescue] is all credited to our students not giving up on their friend,” Robert Connolly, Georgia Tech’s chief of police, said at a press conference on Monday, adding that the police believe he was robbed, as both his and his date’s phones were missing.

Atlanta police public information officer Warren Pickard said they have not been able to interview Jimmy due to his injuries, but “it remains an active investigation,” Reuters reported, via Yahoo News.

On Monday, Battaglia posted a video on Twitter that showed Jimmy in the hospital. Although he was wearing a neck brace, and was receiving help to breathe, he was able to give the camera a thumbs up.

[Photo by endermasali / Shutterstock.com]

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