Proposed Silver Alert bill aimed at missing seniors

OLYMPIA – Samuel Counts left his Spokane Valley home on Nov. 23, 2012, to buy a loaf of bread and didn’t return.

In the early stages of dementia, Counts, 71, wasn’t supposed to drive alone. But he insisted he could get to the store and back. Hours later, his family called police, spread notices on Facebook and scoured the area. His daughter, Susan Belote, said the ordeal was “an entire week of misery, sleeplessness and panic.”

When the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office sent a helicopter to search for Counts’ car on Nov. 30, the crew spotted it deep in the woods near Elk. His body was found a quarter-mile away.

“It looked like he had been there since the day he went missing,” Belote said.

A bill in the Legislature could help find people like Counts soon after they go missing. HB 1021 would have Washington create a Silver Alert – for missing people with Alzheimer’s, dementia and other mental illnesses – similar to the Amber Alert for missing children.

About 60 percent of people with dementia will wander and get lost, according to the Alzheimer’s Association.

“A person with Alzheimer’s, like a child, can get pretty far,” said Lynn Kimball, executive director of Aging & Long Term Care of Eastern Washington.

When patients roam, Kimball said, “time is absolutely critical.” If not found within 24 hours, up to half suffer injury or death.

The bill’s supporters want a fast and efficient way to tell the public about missing people with mental illnesses – on highway signs, radio and local television stations.

“Do we not value them the same way we love children?” asked Rep. Sherry Appleton, D-Poulsbo, the bill’s prime sponsor, at a recent hearing of the House Public Safety Committee.

Although money for the new system would come from the Amber Alert program, the bill can’t make it equal to Amber Alerts, which are a federal program. Media outlets as well as local and state agencies would participate on a voluntary basis.

The Washington State Patrol said the bill wouldn’t add anything to the state’s existing alert system.

“It would just be an additional title for something we already have,” said Carri Gordon, manager of the Patrol’s Amber Alert program.

An Endangered Missing Person Advisory can be triggered for any missing person and notifies law enforcement agencies across the state. That system might be underutilized but is quickly gaining traction, Gordon said. In 2013, three missing people were logged into the database; in 2014, the number jumped to 19.

Patrick O’Neil, of Olympia, however, told the committee the current system isn’t enough. His mother, an 89-year-old dementia patient, went missing last July from her Everett home and was found dead nearly a month later in her car, parked in thick brush off a private road in Lake Stevens.

“I am left with images of an anxious, frightened and very distraught woman,” O’Neil said. “My mother deserved better.”

Twenty-six states have Silver Alert programs. Others, like Washington, have programs that apply to broader categories of missing people.

All are smaller than the Amber Alert, which has federal authorization and access to cellphone networks and television stations. A National Silver Alert Act, which would open those channels for missing dementia patients, has been introduced three times in Congress, but it has yet to pass.

Portable tracking systems that use GPS or radio signals have shown considerable success, especially when combined, said Joel Loiacono, executive director of the Alzheimer’s Association Inland Northwest chapter. But, he said, “The bottom line is there’s no perfect system right now.”

But Belote said a Silver Alert system could have helped find her father in time. “People are looking and paying attention. I truly believe that that would help.”