Mom catches intruder outside son’s window with smartphone app

He told his mother a man was standing outside his window at night, but Melissa Rodrigues dismissed it as a toddler's imagination.

It wasn't until she reportedly found footprints in the backyard of the family's New Zealand home that she began to suspect something more than just a series of bad dreams.

Days later, photos from a do-it-yourself surveillance app finally confirmed the terrifying truth.

"At 5:30 in the morning he let out an absolutely gut-wrenching scream from his room," Rodrigues told Stuff.co.nz of her 3-year-old son, who woke in terror on June 26 for the third day in a row. "I knew something wasn't right."'

Unable to afford closed-circuit TV, the Waikanae mom downloaded a motion sensor app called Salient Eye, The New Zealand Herald reports, training her smartphone camera on her house.

About 4:40 a.m. the next morning, she watched in horror as pictures of an intruder prowling outside her house began streaming to her phone. Her son had been telling the truth.

"It gave me the shock of a lifetime because, even though I was waiting for it, I wasn't expecting to see him," she said.

Police quickly intervened, identifying and arresting the man based on the camera footage.

What the man was after remains a mystery.

Salient Eye was launched for Android by app publisher Mantrishrimp, and was named one of the best releases of 2014 by tech site Digital Spy.

"Salient Eye acts as a home burglar alarm by using your hardware's camera to detect motion and capture a photograph of potential intruders. Users are then sent the image by email or text," the site concluded in its review.

"It isn't the most sophisticated home security solution out there, but it is the cheapest."

For the Rodrigueses, it more than did the trick.

"It meant we didn't have to put ourselves in harm's way to look for him, and with the email alert, we were on the phone to the police in literally seconds," she told the paper.

"This app literally helped our whole community."

This article originally appeared on News.com.au.

Source: Mom catches intruder outside son's window with smartphone app