A Fort Worth, Texas man has been charged with filing a false police report after sparking a frenzied search for a child who doesn’t exist.
Police say a distraught John Jerald Ratcliff, 43, went door-to-door at a Fort Worth apartment complex Wednesday evening, asking residents if they’d seen his missing 3-year-old daughter. Some of the people he spoke to tried to help out by notifying authorities.
Search teams and officers canvassed the city through the night to locate the girl. The search was called off at 6:30 a.m. Thursday when police discovered Ratcliff has no children.
“He should have come clean way earlier,” Fort Worth police spokesman Buddy Calzada says. “We wasted so much time on this.”
There’s no word on Ratcliff’s reason for the hoax.
Source: https://www.dallasnews.com/news/fort-worth/2018/11/15/fort-worth-police-dispatch-28-units-trying-find-mans-missing-child-doesnt-exist
