On the way home from a road trip this weekend, Ann Hautek traveled from Colorado Springs to Cincinnati, and as she sat in an Amtrak’s Acela car in the back of a rental truck, she noticed the next passenger up front. It was Maureen Skelly, a nanny, who was drinking a beer and was in the middle of what appeared to be a long conversation. “She was talking with her headphones on and had tears coming down her face,” Ann told the The Daily Camera. “That’s when I saw the feeling.”
Later, Ann said the look on her face “was definitely not, ‘Will I get there in time?’ I just felt something in my gut.”
Onboard a train with Maureen Skelly, a nanny who was crying while drinking a beer pic.twitter.com/XFdhpVStfM — Ann Hautek (@annhautek) January 6, 2018
Looking up, Ann spotted an arm missing from Skelly’s shoulder, a fact she learned as she waited for a train to carry her back to the security line. “When we got to the security, I said, ‘Is she your arm?’” Ann told the Daily Camera. “He said ‘yes.’ He told me not to worry. I just looked down and said, ‘God bless you.’”
Ann posted the photo on Facebook and got some 200 reactions, eventually getting thousands of shares.
Another traveler who saw the photo and whose Facebook photos mirror it later sent Ann a message. “I got off at Cincinnati that morning and got my truck in that same area around 8 a.m.,” it read. “I also had a problem while sitting there. I picked up my blanket and sat there and felt something heavy.” The driver pulled over, opened his door and said he had just pulled out of a parking spot when he felt the weight of a bag on the truck. “I sat there and still felt something heavy,” Ann wrote on Facebook. “When I pulled out the blanket and saw the other pic of you a little while later, I thought, ‘Oh no, we really were there and it was her arm.’ I immediately thought, ‘I really hope it’s her arm, she shouldn’t have done that to herself.’”
And today, Maureen apologized to Ann for leaving her arm at the train station, which resulted in the social media sensation that is now a national story. “At this point, I wanted to apologize to you,” Maureen wrote to Ann on Facebook. “It was really bad judgment. I’m just trying to figure out the situation.”
One fact that is certain, though, is that “they don’t know me,” Ann told ABC 11. “What I saw was somebody who might seem damaged or made-up, but they’re not.”
Read the full story at The Daily Camera.
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