A Missing Georgia Student’s Life May Have Been Saved by Apple’s Find My iPhone App

Friends of a Georgia college student who had been missing for more than two days found him injured but alive on Monday morning by using Apple’s Find My iPhone application, USA Today reported.

Twenty-four-year-old James “Jimmy” Hubert, an undergraduate at Georgia Tech, disappeared late Friday night after leaving a party in Atlanta with his date’s phone in his jacket. His friends rallied to organize a search party, but the effort was futile until Monday, when his former high school classmate Emma Jeffery had the idea to use the app to locate Hubert’s date’s phone, and in turn Hubert.

It brought them to railroad tracks nearly seven miles from the party he left two and a half days earlier.

“We got out of the car, then we jumped over two train tracks and walked,” Jeffrey told USA Today. “We walked about 10 minutes past where the ping was. We were about to turn around, which is when I said, ‘Is that a person?'”

Hubert was facedown by the tracks, injured and incoherent but alive. His shoes, wallet, and cell phone were missing.

He was taken to a nearby hospital to be treated for hypothermia and his injuries, which his mother said include broken bones, a punctured lung, paralysis, and bleeding in his brain. He was unable to coherently explain how he sustained the injuries and ended up by the train tracks, but police do not suspect foul play in his disappearance.

“We’ve gotten out of him, ‘I was jumped by a homeless person,’ ” Jeffery said. “Then we got, he ‘was beat up by a group of people,’ then he said he was ‘hit by a train.’ But we think he heard the trains going by, just lying there helpless.”