'I'll be there at 5:30 baby': 'Scary’ text sent to Ohio girl's phone

CINCINNATI (WXIX/Gray News) - For the second time in 10 days, a mother is saying her daughter received a bizarre text from an unknown number.

Amanda Jones lives in North College Hill. Her 12-year-old daughter lives with her.

She said her daughter received the following text on Monday:

"Hey your mom told me come get you from Practice @ North College Hill tomorrow I'll Be outside in a white van behind the red car. I'll be there at 5:30 baby."

“As soon as she got it, she ran downstairs and said, ‘You’re having somebody get me from basketball?’ And I said, ‘No, why would I do that?’” Jones said. “She said, ‘Well I just got this text.’ And I thank God that my daughter is able to come to me and tell me things like that, because she was freaked out as much as I was.”

Neither mother nor daughter knew the number from which the text was sent.

Still, it isn’t the randomness that disturbs Jones—it’s the specificity.

“They knew what school she went to, what time basketball got out and all of that information,” Jones said. “Nobody besides me and maybe her close friend should even know any of that. So it’s really scary.”

Jones said she went to police with the text, and they told her to respond to let whoever was on the other end know they had the wrong number.

So that’s what she did. And the person did respond—they said they’d still be there.

The police’s next suggestion? Jones says they told her to block the number, and she did that as well.

The next morning, Jones says she went to her daughter’s school and reported the text to the school’s resource officer, who took the matter seriously.

Jones is taking the matter seriously too, especially as it concerns the safety of her children.

“Even with my little kids, it’s like, hey, if you get this text, right away, don’t ever talk to strangers,” she explained.

Now Jones’s kids have safety procedures — “self-defense,” she says —like passwords to ensure they don’t get in cars with strangers, and protocols for if someone is trying to grab them.

Because Jones said these days, you can never be too safe.

“It’s not funny, if it is a joke,” Jones said. “It’s not OK, and it really hurts me to think that somebody would be after my daughter.”

Read the original version of this article at fox19.com.