The discovery of a missing Greece man has made news nationally.
It's the way 20-year old Nicholas Simmons was found that makes the story unusual.
Simmons' family, who reported him missing on New Year's Day, spotted him in a photograph that appeared in Sunday's edition of the Democrat and Chronicle. The picture showed someone identified as simply "Nick", a homeless man wrapped in a blanket near the Capitol in Washington, D.C.
The Greece Police contacted police in Washington and found Simmons.
The photographer who took the picture of Simmons is Jacquelyn Martin, a 2001 graduate of RIT. “It just reminds you what an amazing world we live in, that I could take a picture on Saturday in basically a random location of random people to have come across a person who happened to be missing, who happens to be from a town where I went to college. It’s just uncanny.”
Martin said when she spoke to Simmons, he was sitting on a heated grate, trying to stay warm in the bitter cold temperatures in Washington. “I always try to get full information, so after Nick told me his first name, I leaned down and said ‘If you want to give me your full name, sometimes people are willing to help. He said, ‘No, that’s okay. Just give my name as Nick.’”
Martin later spoke to Simmons’ parents, who told her they were grateful. “And I was really touched by both parents. They really bled their hearts out to me on the phone. They were very concerned and so thankful this happened. They seem like people who have a lot of faith and they seem to think this was divine intervention.”
Martin says, as a photojournalist, she believes in the power of photographs to tell a story, but it's not often that she encounters such a concrete example of that in her work.
