By 8 o’clock Thursday night, Fredy Walker was scared.

She hadn’t seen her son, Michael Germaine Williams, 43, since Mon., April 3, when he came home early from work and left with a couple to buy a truck. His unusual and long absence led her to file a missing persons report.

“I was hoping he was locked up,” she said. “Not that I wanted him be locked up, but at least I would know he was safe.”

But shortly before midnight, just after the print edition of The Star-News went to press, Walker ecstatically messaged she’d gotten word her son was OK.

“I heard from Michael,” she said. After social media reports circulated that he had been missing for 10 days, someone got word to him.

“He called and he is OK,” Walker wrote. “THANK GOD. I will call the police department tomorrow and let them know.”

Walker said the afternoon her son left her house, he had asked her if she’d help him line up insurance on the truck he was about to buy.

“Since then, I haven’t seen him anymore,” she said early Thursday evening. Williams

also had not shown up for work at SaeHaeSung since that Monday.

Walker was busy that week, as there had been a death in her family, and she was back and forth to Mobile. She texted a friend to see if her son had been at work, and began hoping he was in jail.

“I called the jail and inquired about him before I left for Mobile. The lady said he wasn’t there,” she said. “I was hoping he was locked up. He just got out of some trouble for failure to appear, and we had it set up for him to make payments on his fines.

“But he hasn’t been in my house, and hasn’t taken any clothes out,” she said.

Not coming home is very out of character for her son, she said.

“Maybe on weekends, sometimes he wouldn’t come home,” she said. “But he would always call and say, ‘Ma. I’ll be home tomorrow.’ ”