Photo courtesy of The Columbus Police Department Columbus police, Bartholomew County Sheriff deputies, members of the county’s water rescue team and other first responders gather to be briefed on the search for a missing child with autism on April 17 in Columbus. The boy was found after about eight hours by an off-duty firefighter on Gladstone Avenue.
The Bartholomew County Sheriff’s Department is looking to ramp back up a program seeking to help at-risk individuals, including those with Alzheimer’s, autism, Down syndrome and related disorders, who may wander from home and become lost.
The national program, called Project Lifesaver, uses specialized equipment to quickly find children and adults who have wandered from a safe location and cannot find their way back to safety to reduce the potential for injury, according to its website.
The equipment includes bracelets worn on a person’s wrist or ankle that transmit signals to help triangulate their location to first responders equipped with specialized receivers, officials said. The Bartholomew County Sheriff’s Department and Columbus Fire Department each have three receivers, officials said.
Locally, first responders started participating in the program in 2019 through Bartholomew County TRIAD, a branch of the sheriff’s department run by volunteers and representatives from local agencies.
While the local effort slowed down in recent years amid the pandemic, the Bartholomew County Sheriff’s Department started looking to revive the program several months ago, searching for funding and potentially an organization that can take over running the local program, said Bartholomew County Chief Deputy John Martoccia.
The efforts to ramp back up the local program are being led by Deputy Chad Williams, who has been attempting to contact local residents who had enrolled in the program to see if they are still living in the county and want to participate and change the transmitters’ batteries, officials said.
Currently, there are seven people in Bartholomew County who are actively enrolled in the program and are wearing a tracking device, while an additional four people are currently getting fitted and set up with the department’s last remaining devices, Martoccia said.
Another 25 people are enrolled in the program but listed as inactive, and officials are struggling to make contact with some of them.
Each tracking device costs just under $400, officials said. The sheriff’s department previously received a $29,000 grant from the Custer-Nugent Foundation to purchase the transmitters.
“Our biggest problem is going to be funding, because since it’s all voluntary … we don’t have a budget for this stuff,” Martoccia said. “…(We’re) trying to see if an organization could take it over for us, because like I said, we don’t have funding to buy the devices.”
The continued efforts to update and ramp up the program come after a 12-year-old boy with autism wandered away from his home last week, prompting a large-scale search by first responders, including Columbus police, Bartholomew County Sheriff’s Department, city and county firefighters, water rescue team and other law enforcement agencies. The boy was found unharmed about eight hours later about a mile from his home.
At one point, police allowed local residents to search in addition to the police search, advising them to not trespass on private property at any time. The boy was found by an off-duty firefighter who was driving on Gladstone Avenue at about 2 a.m.
Several studies have found that children with autism are more likely to wander off from home, school or other safe places, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“With the lost child (last week), it would have been nice,” Martoccia said. “But parents also have to get involved with it .. and get them bracelets.”
How the technology works
The transmitters work by emitting a transmission signature that is unique to each device, said Columbus Fire Department spokesman Capt. Mike Wilson. When an individual participating in the program is reported missing, first responders can dial in the frequency of that person’s transmitter into a receiver.
While the receivers do not provide a map with the precise coordinates of someone’s location, they have a needle that moves as a sign as the signal from the transmitter gets stronger and emits a pinging sound, Wilson said.
First responders could then set up a perimeter and begin closing in on the signal, Wilson said.
“It has got an audible and a visual indicator to let you know you’re going in the right direction,” Wilson said. “…It is more of using those audio and visual cues, and ideally in some sort of triangulation. Potentially, you have multiple receiver units in a general area, and they’re all moving to try to converge and reduce the search area.”
The program’s technology has been used to locate at least 4,288 missing people across the country since 2006, according to its website.
So far this year, Project Lifesaver transmitters have been used to locate at least three missing people in Indiana, including a Bloomington resident with dementia who was found after a 2 hour, 37 minute search; a Bloomington resident with schizophrenia who was found after a 10-minute search and a Greenfield resident with autism who was located in just 3 minutes, according to a list of “recent rescues” on the program’s website.
People in other Indiana communities also have been located using the devices, including in Indianapolis, Elkhart, New Palestine, among others.
Wilson said he recalls the devices being used at least once to successfully locate a missing person in Bartholomew County but did not remember details.
“One of the standout features of (the program) is that it helps significantly reduce the amount of time that it would take for searching when one of those devices is in place,” Wilson said. “You’d be able to find them much quicker if they were part of that program.”
Many other Indiana communities have established local Project Lifesaver programs, including Seymour, Nashville, Shelbyville, Greensburg, Greenwood, among several others, according to the program’s website.
For more information
For more about Project Lifesaver, visit projectlifesaver.org.
The Bartholomew County Sheriff’s Department is urging parents and caretakers who have enrolled somebody into the program but have moved out of Bartholomew County to contact Deputy Chad Williams at 812-379-1650.
Jaiden Anderson, left, and Quentin Anderson show their Project Lifesaver bracelets at their grandmother’s house near Jonesville, Ind., Friday, June 7, 2019. Quentin and Jaiden have autism and have a tendency to wander off. Their grandmother Cathy Gray signed up for the Project Lifesaver program in 2019 which provided them with tracking bracelets to track their location if they wander off. Mike Wolanin | The Republic
