No good deed goes unpunished

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Don't ever ask a little kid you don't know to go somewhere with you. That's what predator's do and it's why you were treated as a suspected predator. It's every bit as suspicious as running away like the first guy when somebody sees you talking to the kid.

What should you have done? Rather than trying to get the little girl to go somewhere with you (thereby getting yourself labeled a potential predator) you should have tried to alert other people to come over. Predators don't do that. If you had a cell phone, you should have called the police (being walking distance to the station is irrelevent in this case) or called loudly for help. Both of those actions would have spared you the potential predator label and gotten the little girl to safety without getting you attacked.

I wonder if this first guy might have asked the girl to go with him because he was also trying to bring her back to her parents. GoatOnFire thinks the first guy is suspicious. Maybe the first guy thought GoatOnFire is the girl's dad, so he leaves. GoatOnFire finds the girl's dad. The girl's dad thinks GoatOnFire is suspicious.

Using the cell phone or getting another person from nearby is a very sensible thing to do and necessary, especially if you're a man who finds a child or woman in need of help. Even in an emergency, the first thing to do is to call emergency services even before beginning any kind of treatment or other aid.

Getting another person on your side for any situation also greatly reduces your odds of being attacked or otherwise being taken advantage of. It's not just about safety in greater numbers, but rather, the magic transition from one to two makes it possible to verify truth by consistency of accounts if questioned. An assailant thus expects a much lower likelihood of getting away with attacking one or the other, and is threfore less likely to make an attempt.

I knew I should have never posted this, it was bound to be a lightning rod for condescending advice. Just so angry at the time I wanted to get it out. This was just a rant.

I didn't handle it perfectly, but I'm not always great at handling the unexpected. And how the f**k am I supposed to see this one coming?

What I will take away from this is that I really should get into the habit of always having a cell phone on my person. I don't think it would have mattered too much in this instance anyway. The event in question was the championship parade for the Dallas Mavericks, hundreds of thousands of people attended and the police were rather busy that day. You progenitors of hindsight may not understand that even if I had brought a cell phone, the idea of waiting in near 100 degree heat for someone to wade through a gigantic mess of a parade to find us when the police station was a 5 minute walk away didn't seem like such an attractive option at the time. Finding a second person willing to help in that crowd probably would've taken more time than just heading to the damn police station. This'll probably never happen to me again anyway, so I don't need any f*****g advice.

I was just that amazingly unlucky to actually run in to the girl's psycho parents out of an enormous crowd during a 5 minute period.

That's another thing I'll take away from this. Don't go to a f*****g parade again.

And don't compliment me, either. There was nothing brave about it, I had no idea it would turn out like that going in.

I'm sick of talking about this and will probably delete this tomorrow so I'd appreciate it if you didn't quote it. (Maybe I should learn from my first mistake and not post this)

I had suspected something like that, and that is why I never questioned what you had done. You did as well as anyone could have done in that kind of situation, and we can all only hope those parents learned a good lesson about little girls and big crowds.

IMO the best thing you could have done was to have gone up to some women, perhaps seen if a group of women would have taken the little girl to the police.

Then it would get you off the hook. It is sad that every man is seen as a suspect because of a few bad men who ruin it for everyone. But that is how the world is .

Of course it is always easier to give this sort of advice in retrospect or if it happened to someone else. Dont think about it anymore, anyway.

Or you could have left her and if she'd have been killed, no-one would have blamed you.