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Silver Alerts Could Help Pinpoint Missing Seniors' Location
By Ben Schmitt, USA Today
July 9, 2008
Mary Lallucci believes a notification for missing seniors, modeled after the Amber Alert, could have prevented her mother Mary Zelter from dying after she disappeared from an assisted living home in Florida.
Mary Lallucci shudders at the thought of another family experiencing the agony she went through after her mother disappeared from an assisted-living home in Florida last winter.
Lallucci's mother, Mary Zelter, 86, who had occasional bouts of dementia, left her assisted-living home to go grocery shopping in Largo, Fla., on Feb. 26. A week later, two fishermen found Zelter's body and car in the Intracoastal Waterway off Clearwater Beach.
"Those seven days were so grueling," she says. "You just don't want any other family to go through the terror of that."
Lallucci says a notification system for missing seniors, similar to the AMBER Alert system for finding missing children, might have saved her mother's life.
"I couldn't believe of all the states, Florida doesn't have something like this in place," she said.
Nine states have what's known as a Silver Alert system to help locate missing seniors, according to Eric Hall, president and CEO of the Alzheimer's Foundation of America. Oklahoma, Illinois and Georgia were the first to implement such programs in 2006, he said. Subsequently, six other states — Colorado, Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas and Virginia — have put Silver Alert or similar programs in place, he said.
Four more states have legislation pending: Louisiana, Michigan, New York and Pennsylvania, Hall said.
To encourage more states to establish programs — including his own — Rep. Gus Bilirakis, R-Fla., has introduced the Silver Alert Grant Program Act of 2008, which would pay out at least $100,000 for each state that creates a program for seniors modeled after the AMBER Alert system.
The bill is pending in the House Judiciary Committee, Bilirakis said. A hearing is scheduled for Tuesday. The push for it is prompting Florida legislators to plan to discuss a state bill when they reconvene in January, said Bilirakis' spokeswoman, Liz
Hittos.
"This seems like a no-brainer," Bilirakis says. "We have a model to go by — the AMBER Alert system. There's no reason not to pass this."
The Alzheimer's Foundation estimates that about 16 million people will develop Alzheimer's disease or a form of dementia by 2050. Currently, more than 5 million Americans suffer from some form of the disease.
About 3 million will wander away at some point, Hall said.
"It's almost unbelievable that we are only talking about this now," Hall says. The pain still stings when Dionne Pierce envisions her 79-year-old grandmother suffering from Alzheimer's disease and wandering Detroit's streets, never to be found alive.
Family, friends, strangers and police fanned out across southwest Detroit and neighboring suburbs in shifts, frantically searching for Estella Mozelle Pierce for five days in April 2005. On the fifth day, she was found dead, less than a mile from home.
Police determined Pierce, who was a retired assistant chief of pharmacy at Henry Ford Wyandotte Hospital, located outside of Detroit, fell down an embankment and died of a heart attack.
"You're looking for someone you love, and you can't find them, and there's nothing you can do," said Dionne Pierce, 37. "It's a terrible feeling."
The case united Dionne Pierce and other family members with Michigan Rep. Mark Meadows, D-East Lansing, who introduced a bill in October that would require police to issue a missing persons report as soon as information is obtained on missing seniors.
The bill, which passed the state House and is pending in the Senate, would also require law enforcement to alert the news media in the same way as AMBER Alert systems, Meadows said.
Meadows still remembers the time his father, Harry, who suffered from dementia in his latter years, got lost during a short drive in East Lansing in 2004.
"He handed me his keys and says: 'I can never drive again,' " Meadows said. "We want to protect seniors and make sure they're identified and get them back as soon as possible."
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