Sometimes parking a car goes horribly wrong. It’s not an excuse for what happened in that one case but we do maybe hundreds of wellness checks of various types within a year and nothing close to that has ever happened and we are just one medium sized town.
Yes and no. We would do a welfare check on someone if requested. If someone calls in concerned we are going to go to the house. By that I mean knocking on the door. In order for it to go beyond that to the point that entry is being made there has to be a lot more than just no one has heard from them in 12 hours. I suspect that one of the friends said something sufficiently alarming that it was considered enough of an exigent circumstance that they could request a ping of the phone. Combine whatever alarming circumstance that came from the friend with the phone coming back to the house and no one answering the door and I would authorize entry. That’s just a guess of course. But I agree there is more that the cops were told than what the OP heard.
Another extenuating circumstance beyond what nelliebly listed would be if there was reason to fear she was at risk of violence, like from an ex with a restraining order or other history of boundary issues. Sadly, that seems more likely than some of the other possibilities.
The 33 year old lady was probably never without her phone, making social posts multiple times an hour if not more and making her “presence” known to her friends/family. Then NOTHING! for hours on end, no communication or response to their inquiries. I would be worried also.
Most of our neighbors (except for the rental house) we know of a least 1 family member of theirs in case of any issues with them.
In a lot of places if your (minor child) kid goes missing no one will do anything for 24-48 hours. Why in the world would anyone need to do this for an adult who forgot her phone? I have BEST friends who certainly don’t hear from me every work day or necessarily receive a response within a day or so.
I have to think there’s something more to the story. Perhaps the neighbor has some health issues of the “nunyabizzness-itis” type, that the friends know about but you do not. Perhaps there’s a scary ex-boyfriend who might be up to for some fatal mischief :(. Perhaps the friends have their own issues that cause them to overreact. Perhaps the lack of communication for 12 hours is so wildly out of character for her that it truly would appear to be an emergency.
I’d be surprised if someone ever tried to reach me at my “work” number. For one thing, it’s a virtual number (gets routed to a desk if I’m at the office which happens every year or two, gets routed to my cell phone otherwise), so someone attempting to call my employer would have quite a few hoops to go through to even “call” me - and in the OP’s scenario, the call would most likely get to my “left at home” phone, so that wouldn’t work. I don’t know if someone could even call one of my employer’s locations (they have a LOT) and say “Can you route me to Mama Zappa’s phone please”.
If there’s not more to this story, she definitely needs to cut contact with some people. Anyone who doesn’t realize that the cops on a black person for the ‘crime’ of not bringing their phone with them to work one day is probably going to get that person killed. And if they don’t get killed, they can get the Henry Gates consolation prize and get an arrest for ‘disorderly conduct’ for not groveling to a cop querying them about ‘how dare you be in your own home’.