Missing Canadian Seen at BIA, Took Flight to Fla.
By Diana Graettinger, Bangor Daily News, Maine
Jan. 12–Police have learned that a 51-year-old Canadian woman who has been missing from her home since Tuesday got on a plane in Bangor headed to Orlando, Fla.
Alert airline ticket agents at Bangor International Airport recognized Anna Ringas of St. George, New Brunswick, from a picture in Wednesday’s Bangor Daily News and reported the sighting to authorities.
“There was a couple of ladies that work at the ticket counters and when they got home from work that night, they opened their newspaper and said, ‘Wait a minute, that lady was at the counter today.’ They thought she looked kind of upset and nervous, probably because of her Parkinson’s disease,” Sgt. Greg MacAvoy of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said Friday. “She just kind of caught their eye, traveling alone. So they called local police and they got word up to us.”
MacAvoy said that although they know Ringas caught the flight to Florida, they don’t know anything else about her whereabouts. “A lot of this stuff gets tricky with privacy concerns as to how much information people can release, such as whether she caught any more flights anywhere else in the U.S. There is legwork you can do that sometimes can help, but unfortunately by the time you catch up with the information, it’s old information,” he said.
The RCMP was in the process of contacting the Orlando police Friday. “We still have her on our system as someone we want to find. So if she happens to be checked by police, hopefully they will run her name and find that we are still looking for her,” he said.
The RCMP has been searching for Ringas for four days, when family members reported her missing. She had left her home in St. George, about 35 miles north of Calais, on Tuesday. Police said she then headed for St. Stephen, where she picked up a prescription at a drugstore. She then crossed the border into Calais. In Calais she hired a Washington County man, who was not identified by police, to drive her to Bangor and bring her car back to Calais, which he did. The only contact the woman has had with her family was an e-mail she had sent earlier to a sister.
Ringas is 5 feet 2 inches tall and weighs 150 pounds. She has gray hair and brown eyes.
Anyone with information should contact the RCMP at 888-506-7267 or New Brunswick Crime Stoppers at 800-222-8477.
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