situation was looking more and more dangerous for quin gray. here again is josh mankiewicz. it was sunday afternoon, almost two full days since quin was abducted. and after a terrible morning when the money drop at the crab shack restaurant turned so disastrous, a text message, apparently from quin, was sent to her mom s cell phone around 2:00 p.m. mom, please, no cops. i am so sorry about all of this, but they are pissed, and i want to see my girls. the fbi s hostage negotiator was toni kravit. do you think about the kids in a situation like this? absolutely. reid made arrangements for them to stay elsewhere so they would be somewhat shielded by this. we are in the business of preserving life. that s what we do. do you think quin, maybe she s not even alive any more? we don t know. we don t know for sure.
and successful businessman was at the sheriff s office near his expensive home in pontra vedra, florida. a wealthy community 20 miles south of jacksonville. his wife quin was kidnapped just a few hours earlier. the ransom, $50,000. i m not going to be able to work, sleep, eat, breathe until this is resolved. one thing you have to understand is that in the modern-day market place of crime, kidnapping for ransom is practically an antique. here s why. it s not difficult to abduct a family member of a rich person, but things like improved technical surveillance, cooperation between law enforcement agencies, even caller i.d., now make it just about impossible to pick up ransom money and escape undetected. as a result, the kind of kidnapping you see in the movies, pretty much exists only in hollywood. but for reid gray, this was frightening, nerve racking, reality. and no car trouble, no phone calls in the middle of the
all right. i talk to her first. i see her. and she walks across and gets in my car. ma am, i m making the decisions, not you no, no, i m sorry, but i am going to see my daughter and i m going to have her in my car. i ve got your [ bleep ] money. let me see my daughter and i want her in my car. do you understand? was this at last the end of this ordeal? it was not. because the kidnappers never showed, and quin s mom returned home. that s when investigators realized they had a new problem. deputies in saint john s county are looking for a pontra vedra woman did not return home. somehow it broke on the local news. a story investigators had been trying to keep out of the press. this hits the news. you weren t expecting that? i wasn t. we d been pretty fortunate to have this go a couple days without it being on the news. quite frankly, we don t want them to see it either. but the kidnappers did see it, and they were not happy. quin s mom received a text.
in danger. he picked up his girls from school and took them to a friend s house. while he waited at the sheriff s office. reid was still in his shirt and tie from work, and he was an emotional wreck. he shared more details about quin s brief frantic call to him hours earlier. quin said that there is somebody with a gun pointed at her head. on that call, she said there were three kidnappers and they weral bainian. the $50,000 ransom was to pay back money reid had borrowed from a loan shark, but reid gray insists he didn t owe money to anyone. probably make $1.3 million this year. 50 grand doesn t mean much. why ask $50,000 from a man making more than a million dollars a year? reid didn t know, and neither did investigators. at this point, there was only one goal, quin s safe return.
$50,000. and they said, don t put a gps tracking device in. right. and you did. right. is that standard procedure to sortd of ignore kidnappers when they say that kind of thing? we re in charge of how this goes, not them. the idea was to get the bag to them and find out where they are. but then came something no one expected. quin s mom, gayle sykes. quin called me and said, where s the money? they re going to kill me. where s the money? and you said i dropped it. absolutely. oh, jesus, quin. what kind of people are these? i told you, you go to the crab shack and there s a huge parking lot on your right. listen to me, hello. and for the first time everyone heard the voice of one of the kidnappers. is anybody following me? certainly not. okay. anybody follows you, you know what happens. what i m sorry? hello?