City employee finds missing elderly man
Posted on Wednesday, July 2, 2008
An autistic man is safe at home after being reported missing to police the night of Wednesday, June 25.
The Bella Vista Police Department received the missing person report on Neil White, 23. The man's caregiver called police after White left his residence on Garrison Lane just before 7 p.m.
White was found a couple of miles from his house just four hours later by an offduty police dispatcher Amber Bowman.
Bowman had been handling radio traffic concerning the search for about two hours until she got off work.
When she finished her shift, she asked if she could help because she knew the area very well. "We sent her in an unmarked vehicle so as to not frighten (White )," Sgt. Mark Kugler said.
After driving a little more than an hour she spotted White walking on Mildenhall Drive close to Woodbridge Drive. When she saw him, she stopped and got out of the car.
"I called him by name," she said.
Since she was wearing Tshirt and shorts, instead of a uniform, and was in an unmarked car, he apparently wasn't afraid to get into car with her, she said.
She said she was very relieved to find him.
During the time White was missing, calls from a free service, which sends residents a pre-recorded telephone message, blanketed residences near Hampstead Road in a radius determined by police.
That service, A Child is Missing, is a Florida-based, nonprofit organization that offers aid to police in recovering missing people in the form of telephone alerts.
The message asks its recipients to search in their vicinity for the subject and includes a description of the person and where he or she was last seen.
"We give (A Child is Missing ) an address and what radius we want, and they make the calls," said Kugler, who organized the search.
Joining the search effort was the Bentonville Police Department's K-9 unit.
A command post was set up by the Benton County Department of Emergency Management, Kugler said.
Bella Vista police officer Clayton Roberts was on the scene at White's residence when the man was returned. The officer said White appeared to be fine.
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