Woman Uses Twitter To Help Find Alleged Rapist

After telling Tampa police that she had been raped, a 24-year-old woman quickly posted about the alleged crime on Twitter. She latter wrote in HuffPost's comments that she hoped "those in the area could provide information leading to an arrest." According to the St. Petersburg Times, authorities asked her to stop posting about the rape online, noting that they have never encountered a similar situation before.

"At the time I was working with an ad agency as a community manager, so I was well aware of what sending a tweet meant and the ramifications it held," she explained in the comment on HuffPost.

The woman, who had been living in a renovated schoolbus in Ybor City, tweeted "Ybor- 6'2 black man w scruffy beard blue shirt tan shorts driving commercial truck call me. broke into (the bus) & raped me. Glad im alive," after the attack occurred around 7:30 in the morning last Friday.

She had been living in the bus and blogging the details, according to reports.

"We take steps to protect the victim and sharing certain types of information with an audience that size could compromise the investigation," a police spokesperson told the St. Petersburg Times.

The police are still looking for the suspect. The incident is another demonstration of the unlikely uses of Twitter. Earlier this year, a man used Twitter to retrieve a stolen laptop from hundreds of miles away.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this story indicated that police learned about the alleged crime through twitter. The victim actually called police about an hour before she started tweeting. We apologize for any confusion this may have caused.