Creeped Out at the Airport

Baylie and I spent the previous three days trying to get from Columbia to Las Vegas. We finally made it yesterday. We left Columbia at 3:00 a.m., drove to Charlotte, caught a flight to Houston, then a flight to San Francisco, got bumped several times and finally made it to Vegas at about 11:00 p.m. last night (2:00 a.m. Columbia time, which means 23 hours traveling!). It was an adventure. Thank goodness Baylie is a trooper.

The trip had lots of ups and downs, but something happened at the San Francisco airport that really creeped me out. We were waiting for yet another flight when I realized that a man was holding his iPad pointed at us as if he were taking our photo. I looked at him and so he turned and stopped. Later I realized that he had started filming two little girls. The girls were playing with each other and were in loose fitting sun dresses. I made a comment out loud, but not really loudly, that I thought it was weird that someone would film children like that without their parents' knowledge, but I'm not sure he spoke English or heard me. I just got a weird feeling about it until I finally had to get up and go tell the mother what was happening. She was surprised, thanked me and then started to watch him. She then got up and went and stood between him and her children with her back to him. He moved closer to the girls and kept watching them, but stopped filming. She ended up going and getting her husband and asking him to stand by the girls. When the husband got there, the man moved away. The whole thing just felt creepy and odd. It lasted for several minutes.

I kept my eye on him and he would still periodically watch Baylie, but mostly the other girls. He kept his distance after that, however. Had he tried to film Baylie again, I would have confronted him. I am bothered to know that he might have pictures of her. I'm glad that she was dressed very modestly.

There was nothing illegal about his actions, but they were strange and made me very uncomfortable. I had read Jaycee Dugard's book about her kidnapping and one of the things she mentioned is that her kidnapper would go to parks and have a hidden camera that he used to film little girls who were playing. Child pornographers use these types of photos on their websites. This experience made me think of that. He could have been completely innocent, but his behavior was just weird.

So I'm curious what other people would have done. Would you confront someone in a situation like this? Do you think I was overly paranoid? Do we have any control if someone takes a picture of our child and uses it inappropriately? I have caught people taking pictures of Baylie before, but it never upset me like this experience did.