On Thursday, June 12, Fallon Conway, her friend Amanda Griffith and Griffith’s 3-year-old daughter were using the Sixth Street family restroom on the Ocean City Boardwalk before heading onto the beach when they found something out of the ordinary.
“I was using the bathroom and I looked down — and we had been in there for five to 10 minutes at this point — and I had looked down while on the toilet and saw what looked like a pen sticking out from behind the trash can,” Conway, 25, said.
She then brought the out-of-place object to Griffith’s attention, who then pulled out the trash can and slid it out with her foot.
“She was like, ‘Oh, it’s just a pen.’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know. Hand that to me.’ My first thought immediately was that they make cameras that look like pens,” Conway said. “So she handed it to me, and I noticed there was a lens on it, and then there was a little slide that went over the lens. That was the first thing I noticed. I slid it shut and turned it over, and there was a blue light on the back.”
Conway noticed that it was heavier than a normal pen so she opened it to find an SD card and a charging port in it.
“I don’t even know how she saw that, because I didn’t even notice it at first,” Griffith, 30, said.
At about 12:25 p.m., the Ocean City Police arrived. After they were told the situation, they sent additional officers to check other bathrooms on the Boardwalk. Several additional cameras were found in restrooms at both 10th Street and 11th Street, which the women found out when talking to another news station.
The women later searched online and found the hidden camera pen on Amazon for $37.
Conway and Griffith said they both learned the importance of being aware of their surroundings at all times after this situation. Neither woman has used a public restroom since.
“You have to know that there’s kids going in there. It’s just nasty, it’s disgusting. I don’t even want to think of where that footage was going,” Griffith said. “Now I’m checking everything. I’m looking around, making sure that I don’t see anything that’s odd out of the ordinary in there before I even let her use the restroom.”
Police said they do not yet know how long the cameras have been in the bathrooms, or who left them there; They are also working on figuring out how many potential victims there may be, according to the New York Post.
“I want to assure the public that our detectives will use every available resource to find the person who placed these cameras, and any suspect will be prosecuted to the fullest,” Ocean City Mayor Jay Gillian said, according to a press release.
