'Find My iPhone' app helps save woman's life after car crash

Sometimes it pays to have a predictable iPhone password.

On Monday afternoon, Melissa Vasquez went missing.

The 28-year-old San Jose woman’s Chevrolet Cruze had tumbled down a steep 500-foot embankment on Mount Hamilton. Vasquez lay there, injured, for hours.

When police received an OnStar system report about a rollover accident involving the vehicle, the system’s pegged location was incorrect. It led police to Hamilton’s neighbourhood, not the scene of the accident.

After searching the area for two hours, Vasquez’s cell company gave police an updated location: a 7-mile radius of downtown San Jose. Still, authorities were unable to locate Vasquez or her vehicle.

By 3 a.m. the next morning, Vasquez’s mother filed a missing person’s report.

"The family was extremely concerned about her," Campbell police Lieutenant Gary Berg told Mercury News. “At that point it raised our concern it was something more than an On-Star issue.”

When Officer Dave Cameron met with Vasquez’s stepmother, who lives with Vasquez, he asked her if Vasquez had ‘Find My iPhone,’ an app that lets Apple users locate their misplaced iPhones.

After some searching — and with some help from the wireless company — Vasquez’s stepmother was able to find Vasquez’s iPad in the home. It was locked.

"So I made an educated guess, based on a series of common numbers people use for passwords, and on the third attempt I was able to get in,” Cameron, known within the department as “kind of a tech geek,” told reporters.

The same password also opened the Find My iPhone app. Cameron activated the “lost phone” feature which gave him a map of the missing phone’s location.

Officers responded to that “very small search area" immediately after receiving the information. Less than 20 minutes later — and about 19 hours after the crash — police found Vasquez and her car on Mount Hamilton. Vasquez was laying face-down outside of her vehicle, with “moderate to severe" injuries to her abdomen and legs.

"The officers on the scene said she was face down. She was awake, coherent and she was speaking to officers," explained CHP (California Highway Patrol) Officer Ross Lee.

A U.S. Coast Guard helicopter airlifted Vasquez to Regional Medical Center of San Jose.

"So right now, we’re calling it moderately critical injuries to the lower extremities and abdomen and obviously she’s been down there since 2 o’clock yesterday afternoon so probably in quite a bit of shock as well,” Captain Brad McGibbon, from the San Jose Fire Department, told KCBS on Tuesday.

Vasquez is now in stable condition.

"Sixteen years ago, that wouldn’t have happened," Cameron said of the app that helped save Vasquez’s life. “It would have been phone calls and guesses and maps.”

"We feel pretty fortunate our officer was able to get into that iPad,” Berg told CBS San Francisco.

OnStar is investigating why the location of the accident was misidentified.

"We are saddened by this incident involving one of our subscribers," Stefan Cross, a spokesman for General Motors, the maker of OnStar, said in a statement. “Our subscribers’ safety and security is OnStar’s utmost concern. We are currently conducting a complete investigation, including information we have received from our call centers, our cellular network provider, our engineering team and the local authorities to better understand what occurred.”

Investigators have yet to determine why Vasquez went off the road, but alcohol and drugs are not thought to be factors.

Cameron plans to visit Vasquez in the hospital soon.