Those who use any form of noise-canceling headphones will know just how effective they are.
Whether it be to block out the sound of whining children or moaning parents, they are certainly handy in some situations.
However, TikToker Christina (@movementwithtina) discovered the effectiveness of her Apple AirPods in a unique but terrifying way:
Last year, she shared a video of herself on her usual run, with the onscreen text reading: “POV your AirPods are on noise-canceling and your phone is on DND so you don’t realize you just ran through an active shooting.”
Advert
The short clip shows the content creator jogging through a residential street while sirens sound rather loudly in the background.
Christina then gives a thumbs up to the camera, completely unaware as to what was happening around her.
"The sirens in the back and my blissful unawareness is sending me. But for real this was actually really intense and I’m so sorry for those injured and everyone impacted," she added in the caption.
Police in Atlanta were involved in a lengthy manhunt for suspected gunman Deion Patterson in May last year.
Advert
Atlanta Police Deputy Chief Charles Hampton said then 24-year-old Patterson was at Northside Medical Midtown just before noon and fatally shot a 38-year-old woman and wounded four others.
After leaving the medical centre on foot, he took an unattended pickup truck, with cameras picking up the vehicle’s tag number in Cobb County 20 minutes later.
He was eventually captured inside a gated condo complex just over 10 miles north of where the shooting took place.
Advert
Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens described the incident as a ‘horrible act of gun violence’, adding: “We need more actions [for] the rights of our citizens to go about their lives, to be able to go to a doctor’s office, to a supermarket, to a gas station or to their school without the threat of being gunned down.”
Patterson was charged with murder and four counts of aggravated assault.
In a follow-up video, Christina responded to a user who commented: “I’m sorry but AirPods noise cancellation is not that good lol.”
The TikToker explained how it had all unfolded, saying it still felt ‘crazy’ to speak about.
Advert
“Basically, I live in midtown Atlanta, and I went on a 5k run,” she said.
“I went my usual route and I put my phone on Do Not Disturb - I always do that when I go on my run.”
Christina continued: “I had my AirPods on noise-canceling because I was running through residential streets, and there’s always lots of people out there, and I never had any issues on those streets.
Advert
“To get to the residential streets, I had to run through main parts of the city to get to those parts. So I ran past caution tape, a bunch of cops, ambulances, all this kind of stuff - swarms of people outside.”
She said she was fairly used to such scenes in Atlanta, but ‘maybe not on that level’, and merely assumed it was due to construction work or a car accident.
“So I kept running,” Christina recalled.
“Then once I realized there were more cops going down the residential streets, clearly they were looking for the shooter. That's when I kind of started thinking something was up.
“I took a quick break and I looked at my phone, and I saw my boyfriend had tried to call me and had texted me multiple times saying like, ‘Hey, it’s on your route, please answer’.”
Christina said she was ‘totally fine’ and decided to run back home a different way.
Callum Jones