One of the biggest fears that parents have is that someone might kidnap their children. A mother named Michelle O’Neal decided that she was going to do everything in her power to help prepare her daughter for this possibility.
Besides teaching her daughter the basics, such as hitting an attacker in the eyes, throat and groin, screaming loudly, running and dialing emergency services, Michelle taught her daughter an important lesson about breaking plastic zip ties.
Kidnappers often use duct tape and plastic zip ties to bind the wrists and legs of their victims. A lot of personal security videos trending around the Internet right now focus on victims using various methods to split duct tape that’s wrapped around their wrists. Michelle posted a video on Facebook recently marked #escapezipties that shows her daughter snapping zip ties with relative ease:
Michelle’s daughter threads an untied shoe lace through the zip tie loop and then pulls it toward herself using her teeth. She ties that lace with a lace from her other shoe into a knot and then moves her feet forward and back in a pedaling motion while pulling her arms toward herself. The sawing and pulling put friction and pressure on the bottom of the loop causing it to snap.
Although this method only works if a child or adult victim is wearing shoes that have laces, Michelle’s daughter proves that this technique can mean all the difference between a victim being held captive and killed and escaping to freedom.
