CANTON, Ga. -- A young mother and her two small children can thank the power and speed of "social media."
And they can thank law officers and many, many tipsters.
Emily McCoy, 23, was beaten and robbed during a home invasion Monday night in Cherokee County.
Wednesday just before noon, surveillance video of four people possibly connected to the crime was released by the Cherokee County Sheriff's Office.
The video spread quickly across social media sites.
In a flash -- "We got a lot of phone calls identifying who was in the images," Lt. Jay Baker said.
In fact, so many people called the Sheriff's office so quickly that by the end of the day, all four people were in custody, being questioned.
The video shows four, happy-looking shoppers -- three men and a woman -- smiling and fist-bumping as they walk out of the Canton Walmart, eight miles from Emily McCoy's home. They are leaving with a cart-load of merchandise that they had just bought. Investigators believe they paid for the merchandise using Emily McCoy's debit card, which had been stolen from her at gunpoint during the home invasion.
She told investigators that three men, wearing bandanas over their faces, stormed into her mobile home at 11 p.m.
She said one held a gun on her and the other two carried baseball bats, and one of them struck her in front of her children, ages five and six.
Then, she said, they stole her purse containing a "substantial" amount of cash along with her debit card.
The Walmart video was recorded at 1 a.m. Tuesday, two hours later.
Lt. Baker said it is likely that the home invaders targeted the woman and her husband -- who was on his way home after visiting a neighbor that night -- knowing, somehow, that the couple had just come into some money, and that they had the cash at home.
They live in a remote, heavily wooded and sparsely populated area of the county, northwest of Canton.
"By all accounts, it appears these victims legally came into this money," Baker said. "It would be highly unlikely that these suspects just randomly chose this location to go into, and they were so specific about what they wanted. And they found the items and left. So it appears that someone had advised the suspects or given them information that there was something at this house that they wanted."
Of course, Baker said, if the Walmart shoppers did have the victim's cash with them, and if they had paid for the merchandise with her cash -- instead of with her debit card as investigators believe they did -- then investigators never would have gotten a hit on her debit card and never would have known to examine the Walmart video. The suspects might have slipped away -- unnoticed by cameras, and by social media, and by all their acquaintances who were so quick to turn them in.
"We don't know at this moment if [any of] the four individuals in that video are actual suspects that went into that home," Baker said. "That's what investigators are trying to iron out right now."
Baker said that according to McCoy, the three masked men who attacked her are black. The Walmart video shows two black men, a white man and a white woman.
Baker said that if the two black men in the video are two of the home invaders (with the white man and woman being possible accomplices) then one of the suspects remained, as of late Wednesday, unseen and unidentified.
WXIA