Charlotte Stack ’29
B&P Editor
Late at night on Sunday, September 27, Trinity College student Olivia Smith ’28, currently studying abroad in Rome, was reported missing by her family friends in the United States. Suspicions about her disappearance arose that Saturday morning, when her mom realized she had not posted anything on her Instagram story in over 48 hours. “I had told her to keep her Instagram updated,” Smith’s mother shared, “because that’s the best way for us to keep in touch. I don’t want to text her and she doesn’t want to text me, so it’s just easier to like the occasional story.”
Smith’s parents’ first action was to check her friends’ Instagram accounts, where they found that they had all posted photo dumps from their latest journey to Paris, France, that were primarily artsy scenes of Gothic architecture and blurry night-out pictures that were definitely taken in a drunken stupor with no identifiable people whatsoever. When this route to finding their daughter proved unsuccessful, they continued to other forms of social media as a means for discovery, as every good detective does.
Her public and private Snapchat stories did not provide any information either, although it should be noted that the private story her parents had access to was named “Olivia’s Private Story”, and only one selfie (of her and her parents) had ever been posted. Italian detectives deduced that it was possible this was not her only private Snapchat story, and that Smith had deceived her parents with the nature of private stories. However, when the possibility of this was brought up, they became incredulous, and her mother continued to insist that she was “A cool mom, the kind of mom that you, you know, put on your private story!”
After a harrowing Sunday evening into Monday morning, Smith’s mother decided that as a last-ditch effort, she would send her daughter a text message to check up on her. It read: “You ok?” Sent at 10:50 am Eastern Standard Time, it was only 2 minutes before a bubble with floating dots appeared, followed by the subsequent text reading: “Yeah, why?” This rocked the Rome Police department to their core. No one had thought to directly reach out to Smith, so her mother taking initiative really shocked them.
Apparently, as it turns out, Smith was okay the entire time. In an emailed statement to the Tripod, she wrote, “Yeah I don’t really know why they even thought I was missing. I just wanted to take a break from Instagram all the time. If my mom had just texted me when she first thought I was missing, literally none of this would have happened.”
The Tripod reached out to the Smith family for comment after their daughter was found to be safe, but they have not responded at the time of publication.
