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ELDERLY WANDERERS ENDANGER THEMSELVES, DEVASTATE FAMILIES Saturday, October 08, 2005
Maggi Martin---- Plain Dealer Reporter
Helen Sandon hailed a cab in a forlorn attempt to find a husband who has been dead a decade. She died alone at the bottom of a Willowick cliff, where she wandered looking for that long-gone love.
Lloyd Immke walked away on a sunny day in Mentor a month ago, and the 78-year-old Pepper Pike man is still missing.
They are called wanderers: people, usually older folks with dementia or Alzheimer's disease, who walk away, in some cases forever. Local experts say families should take steps to keep people from wandering away.
Sandon and Immke are among 125,000 elderly who were reported missing within the last year across the country. In Northeast Ohio, 29 elderly people were reported missing in the last two years, according to the Alzheimer's Association, which helps families cope with the disease and its devastating impact.
Most were found within hours, usually within four miles of where they disappeared.
On Thursday, Alzheimer's officials helped locate Santos Cruz, an 86-year-old Cleveland man. He had been seen a few hours before he disappeared at a West 39th Street store. He was found in his old Cleveland neighborhood.
Sandon and Immke were not so lucky.
Willowick police said Sandon, 78, grabbed a Northeast Taxi on Sept. 16, seeking a ride to East 185th Street to try to find her late husband. After a frustrating search, the taxi driver drove the befuddled Sandon back to her Shoregate Towers apartment complex.
Eight days later, her body was found on a Lake Erie beach. Sandon had fallen about 50 feet, down a rocky cliff 200 yards from her home. Police theorize the confused woman may have tried to walk to a lakefront cottage she had owned 30 years before. Preliminary coroner reports show she died from a broken neck.
Rose Immke said her husband of 56 years had walked away before but always returned within a few hours. On Sept. 6, during a visit to his daughter's Mentor home, [mwh: I rearranged this, because it was confusing with the chronology out of order#=cm NDSH=#just want to check with her that this is correct : ]-NT%>he headed south on Heisley Road and disappeared.
"I still can't sleep at night," said Rose Immke, who still searches with her sister on Mentor streets several days a week. "I wake up wondering where he is."
Mentor police said they exhausted every lead after searching for days with dogs, police and volunteers.
"We came up with nothing," said Mentor police Lt. Kevin Knight. "We don't know where else to look."
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