Schaumburg police seek help finding missing senior

The Schaumburg Police Department is seeking the public’s help with finding a missing senior who might be in danger.

Agripina Resendiz, 76, who is under the guardianship of the Illinois Office of the State Guardian because of her medical condition, was last seen Wednesday. Resendiz is a resident of a Schaumburg health care facility by court order.
     
Police said Resendiz was visited Wednesday by her son, Armando Resendiz, who spent several hours with her at the facility. Facility staff later discovered Resendiz missing and believe she may be with her son, police said.

Authorities believe Armando Resendiz, 52, has been living in various hotels in the Northwest Cook County or DuPage County areas. He was seen driving a green 1995 Ford Explorer.

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Schaumburg police seek help finding missing senior

Do ‘Be on the lookout’ Silver Alert warnings work?

When an 86-year-old Glen Rock man disappeared after leaving a relative’s home one evening two years ago, his family searched, police searched and — in a novel approach at the time — motorists across New Jersey were asked to be on the lookout.



TARIQ ZEHAWI / STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER A silver alert on a sign at Routes 4 and 208 in Fair Lawn.  An alert comes about every two days.

Signs up and down New Jersey’s highways the next morning flashed the words “Silver Alert” along with a description and license plate of Edmund Ommundsen’s car. A woman responded, informing police that he had asked her for directions to Hoboken the previous night.

Ommundsen, who had become disoriented from an undiagnosed infection, was found the following night by a Connecticut state highway trooper when his car ran out of gas on an interstate near Andover, almost 150 miles away.

While the woman’s report to police didn’t immediately lead to his rescue, Ommundsen’s son, Glenn, was grateful someone had noticed the signs and called authorities. As the 30 hours of worry went on before his father was found, the family was comforted to know “there were other eyes out there looking for my dad,” he said.

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Do ‘Be on the lookout’ Silver Alert warnings work?

CT Woman Charged for Violating Court Order by Taking Mother to Florida

A Stratford woman was formally charged with first-degree custodial interference for taking her 81-year-old mother from Milford to Florida in violation of a probate court order, police said.

Jeryl Gray, 56, was arraigned Friday in Milford Superior Court and held on $75,000 bond. She had been picked up on a Milford police-issued warrant in Florida on July 20. Her mother, Dolores, who was missing for more than three weeks, was found safe with her daughter. Milford police had issued a Silver Alert for Dolores.

Dolores Gray was taken into protective custody by Florida officials and transported back to Connecticut by her family.

[Jeryl] Gray has been involved in a lengthy dispute with her two brothers over the care and custody of her mother, who suffers from dementia, police said.

In December, the Milford/Orange Probate Court issued an order that Dolores Gray not be taken from the state of Connecticut and granted conservatorship to Dolores’ son, who lives in Milford.

Police said that after a court-authorized visitation on July 3, Gray took her mother to West Palm Beach, Fla.

In a May hearing, Dolores Gray told the judge she is “tired of all the family stuff,” and would like to stay in contact with all three of her children, as well as her only grandchild, who lives in Milford.

“This wouldn’t be happening if their father was alive,” Dolores Gray said, according to a Probate Court transcript. “I’m retired and I’d like to go back and forth between Milford and Florida, but I’m fed up with all this fighting going on.”

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Stratford Woman Formally Charged for Violating Court Order by Taking Mother to Florida

Editorial: Silver Alert Has Proven Its Value

As a child, I can remember joining my family watching our favorite television shows at night while constantly being interrupted with commercials that asked, “It’s 10 p.m. Do you know where your child is?”

Now that I am a parent, I can appreciate that question a little better. However, today we are faced with another question that is just as challenging – “Do you know where your aging parents are?”

As the senior population continues to grow with the Baby Boomers entering retirement, we must be proactive in supporting them and their loved ones. In today’s society, many of us know of or have parents suffering from Alzheimer’ disease, dementia and other disorders.

The Silver Alert program provides a communication network to quickly disseminate information about a missing vulnerable adult in an effort to return them to their residence and/or caretaker. It is very similar to the Amber Alert program for missing children.

Timing is everything, because the survival rate of the missing person is much higher when the adult is located within the first 24 to 48 hours.

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Guest Column: Silver Alert Already Has Proven its Value

National Silver Alert Act (S.557)

U.S. Senator Charles E. Schumer today announced that he is pushing legislation to create a nationwide network for locating missing adults and senior citizens with Alzheimer’s, dementia, and other mental impairments. The Silver Alert Act would create a program, modeled after the AMBER Alert, which would provide federal coordination and assistance through the Department of Justice to local and state law enforcement to assist efforts to locate missing senior citizens across the country.

Schumer said today that a nationwide alert network is critical because missing adults can cross state and county lines.

Senator Schumer is sponsoring the National Silver Alert Act (S. 557), which will encourage and integrate systems throughout the United States to help identify and locate missing seniors with cognitive impairments. The bill will also authorize grants for these organizations. The bill has already passed the House of Representatives.

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Schumer Pushes for Nationwide Alert System to Locate Missing Adults With Alzheimer’s Disease; Almost 22,000 Seniors in Rochester Finger Lakes are Affected

Caregivers Want "Silver Alert"

Ask Elaine McDuffie what it felt like when her elderly mother went missing and she’ll describe the same fear parents get when they’ve lost a small child.

“Your heart is beating hard. You feel it almost coming out of your chest. You’re in a complete state of panic. … All the bad things pop into your head,” said McDuffie of Sleepy Hollow.

McDuffie cares for her mother, Iley Henry, 79, who has Alzheimer’s disease. In the past three years, Henry wandered into the streets twice, once ending up in the White Plains Hospital emergency room after a woman walking a dog found her facedown on a grassy lawn.

Henry is safe and at home with her family now, but other incidents of people with dementia have ended in severe injury – frostbite, dehydration, stroke – or death.

Some of the cases have made headlines recently, including a 73-year-old Yonkers man who went missing for days and was found this week in midtown Manhattan.

With a significant rise in Alzheimer’s diagnoses projected, local advocates are looking for tools to help find missing seniors before it’s too late, including a system identical to one that helps find missing children.

Silver Alert, a copy of the Amber Alert system for missing children, would help police departments communicate with each other and residents in the community when a senior wanders.

The Rockland County Legislature on Tuesday unanimously approved a countywide Silver Alert program. Legislator Bob Jackson, D-Nanuet, proposed the bill after reviewing programs in Nassau and Suffolk counties.

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Caregivers Want Alert System for Eldely