Wanda J. Evans, a 76-year-old woman missing from Meridian, Idaho, has been found in the Peyette River. Or, to be more precise, her prosthetic hip has been found. The authorities were able to match its serial number to her. They searched for the rest of the body but haven’t turned up anything.
They think the death was probably an accident, though obviously it’s impossible to tell for sure at this point. Wanda’s family said she was showing signs of Alzheimer’s Disease before her disappearance.
The Charley Project Blog 
Sigh. When you are done with the study on early death related to parents of missing kids, maybe you can do one on how freaking often mentally unstable patients go missing. Actually, I think you did a blog entry on this long ago…it was a depressingly high amount. At least she was found though. Maybe it is just me, but it seems in a lot of cases they are found “not far” from where they went missing. I guess if it’s rough terrain or whatever that makes it worse, but it also makes me wonder sometimes…….
People with mental illness (although Alzheimer’s, technically, isn’t one) do go missing in frighteningly huge numbers. Probably they’re the largest demographic of missing adults, except possibly drug addicts, and there’s a lot of overlap between mental illness and addiction.
I was never an addict but I used to drink heavily and occasionally use drugs, just to get by. There were a few times when I nearly drank myself to death. Once I had a seizure. Another time I woke up with a black eye, a hideous scrape on my chest and various cuts and bruises elsewhere, and no memory of how I got them. When people told me I was being a moron I told them that whatever made life bearable could not be foolish. Now that I (finally, after twenty years) have my depression under control, I no longer feel the need to drink.
Was Miss Evans in a nursing home? I mean if she was in a nursing home then there should have been someone there to make sure she didn’t wander off. Sometimes people living in a group setting like in a nursing home or a group home setting who have dimensia or some sort of other developmental disability like autism will tend to wander off and not remember what they doing how they ended up where they ended up.
I can remember one such case where a young man with autism in a group home in Oakville, Ontario who wandered off from his asisted living home only to end up in the lake about a week or so later. The police and this young man’s mother looked for him and couldn’t find him. Police divers found this man’s body in the lake. It was horrifiying that a nurse wasn’t assigned to keep this young man from wandering away from his apartment. 😦
I don’t know if she was in a nursing home or not. Lots of early Alzheimer’s people are able to live independently.
Unfortunately people can be slippery. Even when carefully watched, those with dementia etc. have been known to give their guardians the slip and vanish into thin air.
Yes, exactly. I’ve worked in nursing homes for years and I can tell you that some of those older folks can realy fool you. They can look so frail you’d never think they could get very far or move so fast, but they sometimes can. And some of them are very stubborn too.
The thing with Celeste’s guy in Canada is a shame, but if his parents thought he was okay to live in an apartment in an assist-living center rather than in more of a hospital or something like that, then they’re trusting him that he doesn’t need 24/7 nursing care. Its a risk they took. Its a shame it turned out bad, but if they wanted him to lead a more normal life then havign a nurse joined at the hip with him wasn’t what they chose.
Well,I don’t exactly mean that a nurse should have been there for thisman24/7but since it was an asisted living facility you would thinkthat they would have sent somebody who was responsible enough to at the very least checkand make sure that this young man didn’t wander off. I mean isn’t that why it’s that why they call it an “asissted living facility?”? Because everybody lives together and theyhelp keep each other out of physical harm?
There’s different kinds of assisted living but usually what it is is the nurse or aide gives assistance just with what the patient needs help with and the patient is assumed to be able to do the rest. Like he might be able to feed and dress himself but would need to have somebody give him his medicine, or he could need somebody to come in and make sure he was clean and fed. The point of assisted living is to give the patient as much freedom as possible and let them do as much for themselves as they are able to.
I know this post is old, but I just discovered it. Wanda was my grandmother and waa a very special person. She was not living in any type of facility. She was showing early signs of the disease (which I was not aware of until she went missing 4 years before her artificial hip was found). She did fine living at home with my grandfather, my mom and their daughter (she was not my blood grandmother). I still miss her, very much, every day. Our family is lucky that a part of her was found so that we weren’t left wondering, like so many others out there. It’s still very hard, though.