Police helping parents keep special needs children safe
By Emelie Rutherford/ Staff Writer
Friday, October 1, 2004

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FRANKLIN - When Julie Harris heard police were searching for a missing autistic teen from Millis, she called authorities to make sure they would know how to find her own autistic son if he ever wanders away.

Harris, who lives in Bellingham, met with Franklin police Officer Jennifer Mitchell last week to compile information on her 7-year-old son, Matthew, that police can grab to quickly find him if he is lost.

"The Millis police were saying, 'If we knew something about him it might have helped,'" Harris said last Wednesday about the Millis teen while typing descriptions of her own son's mannerisms into a computer in the Franklin police station.

The following day, last Thursday, searchers found Andrew Grant, a 15-year-old with autism who was reported missing from his Millis home two days earlier, one month after leading police on a massive four-day search for him.

Mitchell, whose own 9-year-old daughter Kristin is autistic, helps parents of special needs children create binders with written descriptions and pictures of their children and GIS maps of places they may wander as part of the Early Search Program. Mitchell and her husband Steve Mitchell, a police officer in Medway, joined several co-workers to start the free program last December.

"Will he always answer when his name is called?" Mitchell asked Harris as she filled out a dossier on Matthew. Harris replied Matthew will come to her and her husband if they call his name, but she doesn't know if he would respond to strangers.

"In parentheses put that he will always come if called by mom or dad," Mitchell instructed Harris.

Such notes are important, Mitchell said, because autistic children may be more afraid of strangers than other children. And non-verbal autistic children like Matthew, who don't speak much, she said, may have ways of responding to questions that police officers who do not know them do not understand.

Harris said if Matthew was missing in the woods and 8,000 searchers were calling his name he may not react if something else held his attention.

"He'll think, 'I'm busy looking at the trees,'" she said.

Mitchell said her daughter Kristin's binder advises against sending search dogs to look for her, because Kristin would be extremely afraid of them.

Some autistic kids do not have the normal range of sensations and don't feel the cold, Mitchell said. So such kids' sensory levels would be noted because finding them quickly is paramount, she said.

Harris will keep her manual, which notes everything from Matthew's brown eyes to his penchant for Dairy Queen and McDonald's.

If Matthew is lost, an officer will go to Harris' house and grab pre-made copies of the binder data or a disc with the information that an officer can pop into a laptop in a cruiser. This saves two to three hours of interviewing parents, Mitchell said.

When a child is missing, parents are so stressed they may not think of everything they should tell police and become impatient, Mitchell said.

"They say, 'Don't ask me questions, go find my kid,'" she said.

Franklin police Chief Stephen Williams said the ESP binders may prevent missing children calls to the police, because parents may look in the binders and see a place the child may be that they momentarily forgot.

Williams said spending community policing grant money on the ESP program is worth it because "everyone benefits" from quickly finding missing children.

"You don't have to go any farther than Millis to know what a nightmare this is," he said.

Approximately 30 parents created binders for their special needs children during two workshops last December, Mitchell said.

Harris' husband attended one of those seminars. But when she called the Franklin police after Grant disappeared last month, she discovered there was a problem with the disc holding her son's data and arranged to meet with Mitchell last Wednesday.

"I hope none (of the binders) ever have to be used," Mitchell said.