Bringing loved ones home

Keeping someone safe if they are prone to wandering can be a challenge, but the Crook County Sheriff's Office can help.

The office sponsors Project Lifesaver, a nationwide program designed to help you protect someone who is cognitively impaired. Project Lifesaver is supported by donations and grants and completely free to its participants.

Members of the community are invited to reach out to the office for more information if a loved one has been diagnosed with a condition such as dementia or autism that makes them likely to wander.

A person who is enrolled in the program is paired with a personalized transmitter about the size of wristwatch, which can be worn on the wrist or ankle and is attached via a single-use band.

If the person then goes missing, the Sheriff's Office will send a search team to respond to the area to begin searching. The transmitter will emit a signal that can be detected with a directional antenna.

It's a lot like how Wyoming Game & Fish tracks a grizzly bear, but on a smaller scale. The individualized signal from the person's transmitter allows the search team to home in on the signal, locate the person and bring them home safely.

The person's caregiver will need to check the transmitter on a daily basis to ensure it is working properly, but this takes a matter of seconds. The program mandates that someone must be living in the same residence as the cognitively impaired person who is able to check the transmitter regularly and call in an incident of the person going missing in a timely manner.

A Sheriff's Office deputy will come to your residence to service it around once every 60 days.

Because the program is nationwide, it is also possible that a local partner program can initiate a search if your loved one happens to wander away while you are traveling.

Project Lifesaver was the first organization to apply locating techniques of this kind to the search and rescue of individuals and is now the most widely used and proven program designed for the protection of "at risk" populations in the United States.

The program launched in 1999 in Chesapeake, Virginia, in response to tragic losses of life when a cognitively impaired person wandered and could not be located quickly. It was determined that a program of this type was needed due to the correlation between cognitive conditions and the act of wandering; with such conditions having dramatically increased since that time, the program has grown to become recognized internationally as an effective method of "bringing loved ones home".

According to Project Lifesaver, certified agencies have been able to use the technology to reduce search times from hours or days down to minutes. Recovery times average 30 minutes, which Project Lifesaver says is 95% less time than for standard operations.

If you know someone with a condition that may cause them to wander, please call Sergeant Eric Stevens at 307-283-1225 for more information.