Irene Wozniak left her Cheektowaga home on Monday to go to a repair shop in West Seneca,

but instead the 88-year-old woman drove about 70 miles to a village in Livingston County,

where she crashed her car.

In March, relatives reported Honor Jill Williams, 85, missing from her home in Niagara-on-

the-Lake, Ont. Her body was found one month later, when it washed up on the Lake Ontario shore

outside Rochester.

In February, Gregory Beiter, 69, left a group home for adults on Richmond Avenue and was

missing until he was spotted the next day in downtown Buffalo.

"People [with dementia], they get confused, and they're trying to find familiar places,"

said Dr. Bruce Naughton, head of the division of geriatric medicine at the University at

Buffalo. "They can get quite far, and the farther they go, the greater the risk of serious

injury."

Experts say wandering is a growing problem because of the aging population and rising cases

of Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia.

"It's kind of like you're in a stupor," said Judy Blake, a Wheatfield resident whose

elderly father went missing two years ago. "You're in a frame of mind where you don't know

what to do. You don't know if he's in a ditch somewhere. It's very stressful and scary."

Senior facilities take steps to identify and provide extra safety measures for residents

who are at risk of wandering.

Family caregivers also are starting to use the latest technology, such as GPS-based

tracking systems, to keep their elderly relatives from going missing.

But facilities and families must balance seniors' need for security with their desire for

independence.

"They're a very vulnerable population," said Miriam Callahan, project coordinator for the

Erie County Senior Services' caregiver resource center.

It's hard to come by reliable statistics on wandering.

But 60 percent of people diagnosed with dementia will wander, said Julie Schoenecker,

program coordinator for the Western New York chapter of the Alzheimer's Association.

Protecting the elderly

Some tips for keeping aging residents safe at home

Don't keep car keys by the front door.

Hook up an alarm system to doors or a doormat.

Install door locks higher or lower than normal. Lock them only if someone is home with the dementia sufferer.

Paint a door to make it blend into the wall.

Let police know you have a family member at risk of wandering. Provide a photo, description, address and contact information.

Erie County Senior Services provides a no-cost "Alzheimer's Proofing Your Home" program. Call 858-2177 or e-mail caregiver@erie.gov for more information.

Sources: Alzheimer's Association of Western New York; Erie County Senior Services.

In the past four months, The Buffalo News has reported on five cases where police agencies issued alerts for an elderly person who went missing.

Of the five, two were found dead. Besides Wozniak, Williams and Beiter, the other cases

involved:

A woman who walked away from her Buffalo Street home in Hamburg and was found less than

half a mile away, in a wooded area off East Main Street along Eighteen Mile Creek.

Margaret Herron, who was 76 and had Alzheimer's, lived with her son and went missing the

morning of Feb. 10, Village Police Capt. Michael Melisz said. She was found dead of exposure

and hypothermia at 5 p.m. the same day.

An East Side man went missing last month for more than a day before he was spotted in a

Cheektowaga garage.

James Taliaferro, 83, was reported missing the morning of May 20 from his Cornwall Avenue

home. He was found at 3:25 p.m. the next day by Cheektowaga police responding to a report of a

burglary in progress in a Heather Road garage, said police Capt. James Speyer.

Taliaferro, who has early-onset Alzheimer's, left when police arrived but was found nearby

a short time later, police said. He was not injured.

Judy Blake's father, David Sprankle, now 84, was out in their Wheatfield garden on a June

day in 2008 when he grabbed the keys to the van and drove away.

Blake said her father apparently was heading to an Indian reservation to get gas for the

lawn mower because he had a gas can with him. "He went down the road, and he was gone for 11

hours," she said.

An EZ-Pass bill showed that after going to the reservation, he went to Rochester and got on

and off the Thruway four times.

Blake described the 11-hour ordeal as "very, very stressful" for her and her family.

"He doesn't remember any of it," she said. "If you sat down and talked to him, you wouldn't

think anything was wrong."

People suffering from dementia may wander when they get an impulse to return to somewhere

familiar. "As you age, you tend to go back in time," said Dr. Kenneth A. Garbarino, medical

director of the Geriatric Center of Western New York at Millard Fillmore Hospital.

Among its many protective steps, Mercy Nursing Facility at OLV in Lackawanna has closed-

circuit cameras at its exits, and the stairwells and service elevators can be accessed only

with employee ID badges.

Mercy also has a dexterity cover over the buttons in the visitors' elevator. Users must

push a pen, which hangs next to the panel, through a hole to select a floor, a task that

deters residents who have dementia, said Patricia Weeks O'Connor, executive director.

"We don't want to do anything to discourage their movement around their units," she said.

"But we have security measures to keep them from going into areas where they would be

misdirected."

At Beechwood Continuing Care, a nursing home in Getzville, employees and regular visitors

receive swipe cards, said Bob Meiss, Beechwood's president. If a door is opened without a

swipe card, an alarm will go off and alert staff.

Residents at risk of wandering are given bracelets with a sensor. When someone wearing the

bracelet passes through a doorway, an alert is sent out.

Persistent cases of wandering require creative solutions.

Meiss said a colleague at another facility built a fake bus stop on the grounds to deal

with a woman who would try to leave at the same time each day to catch a bus. "It apparently

had worked for this particular resident," he said.

The families tend to appreciate these extra steps, because wandering is one reason that

relatives place a loved one in a facility, administrators said.

Emogene Black came to live with her daughter, Lisa LaValley, and her family after Black was

diagnosed with dementia.

LaValley never thought her mother would wander, but she did one rainy day last August.

"About 5 o'clock in the morning, I woke up to the Hamburg police who were in our living

room," LaValley said. "She had gone out ... no shoes, no coat, no walker ... and she was walking

down the street."

People delivering The Buffalo News spotted her, put her into their car and called police.

"When she came back and I got her inside, she didn't realize what time it was," LaValley

said. "She had no idea where she was going."

LaValley, who works for the Alzheimer's Association, has since moved her mother into the

dementia unit at Mary Agnes Manor in Buffalo.

"I felt out of control, because I didn't feel I was dealing with someone who could

logically determine what was safe any longer," LaValley said.

Part of preventing wandering is making sure that relatives remain comfortable at home.

Someone with poor eyesight, coupled with dementia, may believe that the pattern in the

living-room rug is a swarm of bugs, or stripes on the wall are prison bars, said Callahan of

Erie County Senior Services.

In addition to low-tech options, such as installing a night light, GPS-equipped systems to

locate people with dementia are becoming popular, experts said.

One Web-based tracking system with GPS technology has been offered through the local

Alzheimer's Association chapter since October.

A locator device can be worn on the wrist, carried in a pocket or mounted in a car, and

customers can sign up for different levels of monitoring through the application.

News Staff Reporter Gene Warner contributed to this report.