‘Missing’ tot safe
With mom, despite Canada sports anchor’s scary post
The 1-month-old daughter of Canadian sports anchor Dan O’Toole was found “safe” and sound after the “SportsCentre” host reported her missing in an alarming Instagram post Thursday.
“We have looked into the social media post of a local resident/sports broadcaster regarding an alleged abduction of his baby daughter,” Durham (Ontario) Regional Police wrote in a Twitter post early Friday.
“Although this was not reported to us, we can confirm the baby has been/ continues to be safe with her biological mother in the Peterborough area,” police said.
The department later deleted the tweet, but only because the situation is not an active police investigation, a Durham Regional Police spokesman told the Daily News.
“There’s no secrecy around why we took the tweet down,” he said Friday afternoon, reiterating that “the baby is fine with the biological mother.”
“People were starting to imagine we were involved in a full-fledged missing person’s investigation,” and that’s not the case, he said.
“The reason we did the tweet at 1 a.m. was to explain to people what was going on. They were starting to criticize us for not issuing an Amber Alert, so we tried to put some context around what we thought this was.”
O’Toole reported his baby daughter missing in a now-deleted Instagram post that included a black-and-white snapshot of the infant named Oakland.
“Praying that whoever has you, is holding you. That whoever has taken you from me, is protecting you,” he wrote in the caption.
“To be clear, Oakland is alive, we think. But we don’t know,” he wrote. “I have a one month old child, and I don’t know where she is.”
He later updated his status to read, “My amazing ex wife Corrie has NOTHING to do with this. Please leave her alone,” according to “ET Canada.”
The TV personality — who has two older daughters as well — then updated the post again before deleting it altogether, saying little Oakland was “safe” though he hadn’t been reunited with her yet.
“To those that decided to bash me during this ordeal, tell me this: have you ever looked in the eyes of your kids, and not been able to tell them where their sister is or when they will see her again?” he wrote, according to People.com.
“We are still broken,” added O’Toole. “We may never be fixed again.”