State’s New ‘Silver Alert’ AIDS Searches for Adults: Law, Media to Be Told Quickly of Wanderers
By Lorenzo Perez, The News & Observer, Raleigh, N.C.
Dec. 19–RALEIGH — The state will introduce an alert program today to help law enforcement agencies find wandering adults with Alzheimer’s disease, dementia or other cognitive disabilities who have been reported missing.
The Silver Alert was modeled after the well-known Amber Alert program used to notify the media and flash messages on road signs whenever a child is reported missing or abducted. The program follows passage this summer of a state law empowering law enforcement officials and the N.C. Center for Missing Persons to begin issuing a public alert as soon as a person with dementia or some other cognitive impairment is reported missing.
The alerts will trigger statewide broadcasts of missing-person reports to law enforcement agencies, and information on missing elderly persons will be distributed to the news media. Unlike the Amber Alert system, though, Silver Alerts will not be broadcast on the emergency alert system, which transmits a tone signal to television and radio stations indicating that an emergency message will follow.
Triangle law enforcement officials and advocates for the elderly said the new state program should help. Alice Watkins, executive director of the Eastern North Carolina chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association, said area law enforcement agencies have a good track record responding to reports of missing elderly patients.
“But they didn’t have a system in place throughout the state where different law enforcement agencies could work together,” Watkins said. “When adults walk away from home, and they’re suffering from dementia, they really are extremely vulnerable.”
Even on foot, wandering Alzheimer’s patients can quickly put several miles between them and their homes before a search gets under way. In one recent case, Wake County Sheriff Donnie Harrison said, an elderly man who lived just east of Garner hitched a ride and ended up three or four miles away before deputies located him after almost a five-hour search.
“Trying to get the word out as quick as possible to notify people, that’s a key,” Harrison said of the Silver Alert system. “They can travel at a greater rate of speed than you think.”
Capt. Buck Pipkin of the Johnston County Sheriff’s Office’s special operations division said there are inherent challenges in searching for an elderly person suffering from Alzheimer’s or other dementias that make alerting the public and employing its help quickly extremely important.
“They’re disoriented, and they get out in the woods or in a big urban area, and then they hide because they’re scared,” Pipkin said. “They won’t respond if you call out their name, so you basically have to walk right up on them to locate them.”
H.B. Rogers hopes the new program will help cut short the suspense and worry that builds up during searches for missing Alzheimer’s patients. His wife, Mildred Early Rogers, was afflicted with Alzheimer’s and died in August after wandering away from their Raleigh home.
Raleigh police found her body more more than two miles away in a boggy, overgrown area near Crabtree Creek three days after Rogers reported her missing. Rogers said he could not think of how Raleigh police could have been more efficient or responsive in their search for his wife, but he applauded the intentions behind the new program.
“I would think that it might help alleviate the suspense of a missing person,” said Rogers, 75. “It might even rescue someone who is in danger of being trapped, as my wife was. I would hope that’s how it would work.”
lorenzo.perez@newsobserver.com or (919) 829-4643
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