This post is not for parents of kids with autism, it's for everyone else! This article paints a clear picture about "eloping" or "wandering" and our kids. Please consider forwarding or re-posting in our effort to create a community safety net for our kids through education.
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| Our kids don't have to be a statistic. |
Half
of All Autistic Kids Will Run Away, Tragedy Often Follows
way
from home before their 17th birthday. Many of them die, often by drowning.
Within hours one day in April, two children
went missing hundreds of miles apart from each other.
On the surface they appear to have little in
common.
Angelo Messineo is a 16-year-old from Georgia.
He was found alive on a horse farm four days after he disappeared from school
on April 16. Alyvia Navarro, 3, of Wareham, Mass., was pronounced dead hours
after she was reported missing, drowned in a pond near her grandmother's home,
on the same day.
They are just two of the thousands of children
who went missing last month.
But Angelo and Alyvia have one thing in
common, and it's a trait shared with at least one child who goes missing every
day in America. They are autistic.
Nearly half of all
children with autism will run away and potentially go missing at least once
before their 17th birthday, according to a study by the American Academy of
Pediatrics. Of those who run away, what clinicians call "eloping," many
will be found dead.
The numbers alone present a challenge for law
enforcement authorities, who regularly rank searches for missing children among
the most difficult work they do.
But finding children with autism -- who shirk
when their names are called out, who run away at the sound of police sirens,
who are afraid of the dogs sent to find them, and who naturally are comforted
by burrowing and hiding -- makes a hard job even harder, investigators say.
One in 50 children is diagnosed annually with
autism, a spectrum of neurodevelopment disorders marked by problems with social
interaction and communication, according to data from the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention in Atlanta. As the number of children who are diagnosed
increases, so too does the number of kids who run off, leaving rescuers to
learn quickly how best to handle a unique set of challenges.
The stories of Angelo and Alyvia, and dozens
of children like them, present two sides of a phenomenon still not entirely
understood.
On the one hand, autistic children are more
likely to run away than unaffected children. When they do runaway, they are
more likely to die than unaffected children. And more often than not, 91
percent of the time, those deaths are a result of drowning. But what is so perplexing to researchers and
rescuers are the stories like Angelo's. Stories of almost super-human rates of
survival for young children with developmental disabilities, who manage to stay
alive for days often in the wilderness and against staggering odds.
"It's a mystery," said Robert G. Lowery
Jr. of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. "Time and
again, we see cases where autistic children live longer and survive in harsher
settings than unaffected children. We don't really know why. It might be that
these children with autism have a diminished sense of fear, but it's
astonishing."
Stories like Alyvia's are also all too common.
The 3-year-old girl was there, at her
grandmother's side at their home at the Lakeside Trailer Park in Wareham,
Mass., and a moment later she was gone. Twenty-five minutes later, her
grandmother Valerie Navarro called the police. Police, fire, EMS, K-9 units and
the nearby harbormaster began a search for the girl, who was discovered an hour
later, according to Wareham police.
A patrol found the girl in a pond near her
grandmother's home, and she was evacuated via helicopter to a hospital in
Boston where she was later pronounced dead.
Girls More Likely to
Die
Calls to Alyvia's grandmother Valerie Navarro
were not returned.
Boys are four times more likely to be
diagnosed with autism, but girls, like Alyvia, are twice more likely than boys
to die after an elopement, according to Lori McIlwain, executive director of
the National Autism Association, which tracks eloping incidents and deaths.
In 2012, 195 autistic children went missing,
according to the autism association, which only tracks those incidents reported
by the media.
Between 2009 and 2011, 91 percent of autistic
children younger than 14 died in drowning incidents after elopements. More than
two-thirds of those deaths occurred in small natural bodies of water like
creeks, lakes, rivers and ponds.
"Oftentimes, children who go missing are
low or nonverbal," McIlwain said. "But they know where a pond is.
They see it from the car going to and from school every day, but they can't
tell mom or dad that they want go to the pond and play. They think about it and
when they have the chance, they bolt."
It's a story all too familiar to Beth Martin,
a single mother with three kids, whose 7-year-old daughter Savannah drowned in
a pond near her Lawton, Okla., home in 2011.
"My daughter loved Ramen noodles,"
Martin said, remembering the Sunday morning that her daughter died. "I
knew I had exactly four minutes. Typically, she would stare for four minutes,
watching the noodles cook. I popped my head outside to tell my oldest, who's
11, to watch my youngest, who's 2, because I was going to run to the bathroom.
I thought it was safe to go to bathroom."
'I Couldn't Get Them
Both Out of the Water'
Before the noodles finished cooking, Savannah
and her younger brother were gone.
"They both were missing," Martin
said. "I asked the oldest where they went, but he didn't know. I panicked
and looked all over the house and yard. I kept calling their names. I ran to
the highway and then to our neighbors to ask if they had seen them. I asked my son
to wait by the house and he came running to say he could hear them
screaming."
By the time Martin made it to the half-filled
pond on the edge of her property, Savannah was under the water. Her younger
brother, who had been wearing a padded bicycle helmet, was kept barely afloat
by its buoyancy.
"I couldn't get them both out of the
water. … I started to panic and the neighbor jumped in to pull them out,"
Martin remembered. "I just collapsed after that."
Martin was a conscientious mother. When
Savannah was born, doctors told her that her daughter would never talk or say,
"I love you, mommy." Martin worked with her religiously, and the girl
had begun talking. She even knew the lyrics to her favorite Taylor Swift songs.
She had enrolled Savannah in kindergarten,
registered her for swim lessons, was looking to install alarms in case she ever
ran off, and made a point to teach her daughter the boundaries on the property.
"I thought I had spoken with all kinds of
experts about raising a child with Savannah's needs. But I was never told about
wandering or about the likelihood of drowning. No expert ever told me
that," Martin said.
In that way, Martin is like the majority of
parents raising children with autism.
Sixty percent of parents are unaware of the
likelihood that their child will elope or the subsequent risks of death,
according to a survey by the National Autism Association.
The National Center for Missing &
Exploited Children works with law enforcement agencies across the country to
train cops on how best to search for children with autism.
Deaths Are Quick and
Quiet
"We make recommendations to law
enforcement about things they should be doing immediately," said Lee
Manning, a former Massachusetts state trooper and now a consultant for the
National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
"[Police] have to respond very seriously
and not waste any time. One of the things we strongly recommend is to get first
responders, even neighbors, dispatched to local bodies of water right
away," said Manning a member of Team Adam, a nationwide rapid response
team of retired cops that helps law enforcement on the most difficult missing
children cases.
Tragedies like the deaths of Savannah and
Alyvia rarely make the front pages of newspapers or the morning television
programs.
Their deaths are quick and quiet. But there is
another class of autistic elopers who beat the odds with such astonishing
results that law enforcement officials and rescuers are studying them to learn
how best to search for runaways in the future.
On the same day Alyvia went missing, so did
Angelo Messineo.
Angelo is a 16-year-old boy with a severe form
of autism. A ward of the state, he is nonverbal and prone to violent outbursts.
He "bolted from school after some sort of incident" in Lithonia, Ga.,
according to investigators.
Police scoured the woods of DeKalb County,
Ga., for four days with few clues. Angelo was found April 20 on a horse farm 14
miles from where he was last seen. He was identified by police after an
altercation with other teenagers.
He was taken to a nearby hospital and treated
for dehydration.
Calls for comment to the DeKalb County School
District were referred to the National Center for Missing & Exploited
Children.
'They Tend to Burrow
Down and Hide'
Unaffected children tend to panic, they walk in
loops, they take dangerous risks in an attempt to save themselves, but children
with autism tend to "have a diminished sense of fear," Lowery of the
National Center for Missing & Exploited Children said. "There's a different search criteria for
children with autism. They tend to burrow down and hide. We don't know if it's
because they fear searchers or if it's a kind of game. They seem to realize the
peril they're in," he added
Two of the largest missing children searches
in recent years involved kids with autism.
In 2010, 11-year-old Nadia Bloom was found by
a volunteer after spending four days in an alligator-infested swamp in Florida.
She was dehydrated and covered in insect bites.
In 2011, the largest manhunt in Virginia
history took place more than six days as volunteers and rescuers scoured a
dense forest looking for 8-year-old Robert Wood Jr., who ran off while visiting
a state Civil War park with his father.
Robert was found alive by a volunteer, who has
remained anonymous even to the boy's family, in a quarry about a mile from
where he went missing. When he was found, he was in a fetal ball and burrowed
in the dirt.
The search for Robert has become an important
model for rescuers who conduct searches for children with autism.
"We knew never to take him where there
was a pond," his grandmother Norma Williams said. "Like many autistic
children, Robert is fearless. He doesn't feel pain. He doesn't fear heights. He
doesn't fear water, but he can't swim. He'll jump off just about anything."
Many of the things that attract autistic
children, often to their demise, were in the park trails that connected to
rivers, roads and railroad tracks.
For five nights, Williams camped outside the
park in her truck praying and waiting for news of Robert.
"I dropped to my knees when they told me
he was alive and an investigator helped to get me back up. I couldn't stop
crying," she said. "Robert's feet were so swollen, his shoes were
stuck in mud, he had curled up in a ravine when the temperature dropped and it
began to rain."
Since his rescue, Robert's family has allowed
the local sheriff to outfit him with a radio anklet similar to those given to
prisoners on house arrest, so he can be tracked if he runs away in the future.
"People have to understand autistic
children aren't like other children," Williams said. "They're
special. They run when they want and do what they want. And just because they
can't speak doesn't mean they're not thinking things.
"If you went to those woods, you'd see
they're so dense the light doesn't come through. There's coyotes and snakes and
spiders.
"How did he survive? How do they survive?
If you don't believe in God, come see Robert."
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