Mary Thornberry finally made it back to the U.S. on Sunday after being trapped in her apartment in Cairo.
Millions of people followed the story. One of those people was a woman in Phoenix named Ginger Butler. She has a fiancé in Cairo named Hisham.
She also has friends in Seattle and Olympia, and between them they started the series of events that led to Thornberry getting the help she needed.
"I knew immediately he was the guy to go rescue her," said Butler. "I knew it without a doubt that he was the one for the job."
So she called Hisham in Cairo and told him the story of the 76-year-old American woman trapped above the chaos in Cairo's Liberation Square.
"I called him and I said this lady needs help, she's in trouble, no one can help her, and he's like 'yes of course with pleasure, where do I go, where is she?'" said Butler.
But how could she connect the two and get in touch with the man she saw on the news, the worried son in Washington state? She called her two best friends who live her.
Butler says within a matter of seconds she had a phone number for Phil Derrick and she contacted him.
"Based on the conversations we knew he worked at the embassy but was willing to do this on the sly, without their knowledge about it," said Derrick.
Mary and Hisham were connected by phone in Cairo. He went and got her out of the apartment and escorted her to safety.
"We're just glad it's coming to an end," said Derrick. "I was just an ordinary high school teacher, my mom was just an ordinary retiree. We will be very glad, when all of this is over, to just fade back into the woodwork."
Ginger Butler says Hisham didn't know that Mary Thornberry was on the news.
"He asked me later, hey how did you know about this lady, I said 'Hisham, the whole world knows about this lady," she said. "And he's like, you know I would do that for anybody."
Hisham is a driver who works for the embassy in Cairo. He's trying to get back to this country so he and Ginger can get married.
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