Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office
Police rescued a kidnapped woman after she secretly passed a desperate note to a stranger at a gas station in Arizona, authorities said.
In the note, she wrote "help" and "call 911," and also included a description of a blue Honda van going toward Las Vegas.
The customer provided police with descriptions of the woman and the man she was with. Police eventually located them on Interstate 40 on Tuesday, Yavapai County Sheriff's Office wrote in a Facebook post.
Police detained the suspect, 41-year-old man, Jacob Wilhoit, who is alleged to have abducted her from a car dealership that morning while wearing a wig and pretending to be an Uber driver.
The woman had been reported missing by her mother earlier that afternoon and Wilhoit was named in the entry as a person of interest, the Facebook post said.
Sheriff's office spokeswoman Kristin Greene told The Washington Post it was "definitely a targeted kidnapping."
The woman was "unbelievably traumatized," Green said, "to the point where she wasn't able to give a full interview" to authorities, The Post reported.
"But in her initial comments after she was rescued she said she was taken against her will and she did not go consensually."
At one point, her hands were restrained with zip-ties, Green also told The Post.
Wilhoit has been booked on several assault charges, as well as unlawful imprisonment and kidnapping, among other things, police said.
"It is a crazy story, but one that we wanted to tell specifically because of what the victim did for herself to help herself," Yavapai County Sheriff's Office spokesperson Kristin Greene told reporters, per ABC News.
"A lot of us might've looked at this person like she was crazy, and thank goodness this customer took her seriously, and the customer called 911," she added.
The Yavapai County Sheriff's office told Insider that the case remained active, but there were no new updates as of Saturday.
