The holidays haven't been the same for the Burr family.
Mililani resident William "Bill" Burr has been missing for two months, and his family is still looking for him. Before his disappearance, the 79-year-old Vietnam veteran was diagnosed with dementia.
Joseph Burr, Bill's younger brother, flew from Ohio to Hawaiʻi to help in the search. For five days straight, he attempted to trace his brother's steps to his most visited areas in Central Oʻahu. He said the family received lots of support from the community, which helped spread the word on social media.
They haven't had any luck, but the family hasn't given up.
"It was very stressful," Joseph Burr said.
This missing persons case isn't unique. The Honolulu CrimeStoppers reported Ewa Beach resident Juan Rodriguez, 73, has been missing since November, and Kapolei resident Francisco Pangelinan, 85, since May. Both have dementia.
As Hawaiʻi's aging population increases, keeping track of loved ones has been a challenge for a growing number of local families.
Health advocates are pushing for a bill that would implement the Silver Alert Program in the upcoming legislative session. Much like the AMBER Alert system for locating abducted children, the program would do the same for older adults with cognitive impairment or dementia.
Hawaiʻi had 29,000 people aged 65 years or older living with Alzheimer's disease in 2020, according to figures by the Alzheimer's Association. That number is expected to increase by 20%, or 35,000, in the future.
Finding loved ones
Nearly 7% of people 45 years or older have subjective cognitive decline or dementia, according to the Alzheimer's Association.
Alzheimer's and dementia are culprits of memory loss, but dementia causes people to wander. At least 60% of people living with dementia will wander, according to Ron Shimabuku, the director of public policy and advocacy at the Hawaiʻi Alzheimer's Association.
He said the Silver Alert Program would help speed up the search for wandering seniors.
"It's just a quick way to communicate to the masses, the public, to aid in recovering missing seniors," he said.
Hawaiʻi is one of several states that doesn't have a Silver Alert Program.
Other states have it in law to implement the program. Shimabuku said the programs have evolved over the years, noting that some states added developmental impairments, such as autism and epilepsy, to the alert system.
"The Silver Alert Program, unfortunately, is not a federal mandate, and it's not federally funded," Shimabuku said. "So, states across the country have different criteria set and who manages and coordinates the program, which may differ across states."
A measure aiming to create an alert program for missing senior citizens with dementia was last introduced in 2020, but died early in the session.
The bill received much support from the state's Executive Office on Aging. The Department of the Attorney General and the Honolulu Police Department opposed the measure at the time.
The AG office had testified against the alert program, citing 2019 statistics of missing seniors and noting that county police departments "consider themselves to have adequate resources." They also said local broadcast media has been cooperating with law enforcement in publicizing missing seniors.
In an email, HPD spokesperson Michelle Yu said the recovery rate for cases involving kūpuna diagnosed with dementia or Alzheimer's is 99%. She added that some people have wandered from home more than once.
"The Missing Persons Detail consists of two investigators," Yu said in an email. "The detail is able to request assistance from the Criminal Investigation Division, Specialized Services Division, Patrol Districts, and other units as needed. HPD routinely notifies government and business partners, such as law enforcement, OTS and the Honolulu airport, when an individual goes missing. Searches for missing individuals are also publicized through Crime Stoppers, media and social media."
However, Joseph Burr said it's still disappointing that Hawaiʻi doesn't have a Silver Alert Program such as the one in his home state of Ohio.
"(In Ohio), they use broadcast media, they use television news, they use newspapers, and they use the internet system," Burr said. "Local police put out missing senior alerts through different types of media such as Facebook and Instagram, so there's a good amount of information when there's a missing senior."
He added that Ohio even has electronic signs over the interstate system detailing their missing senior's license plate, vehicle color and last known location with a timestamp.
Burr said he questioned HPD's 99% recovery rate of missing seniors.
"While I was on the island in early October, assisting in the search for my brother, I ran across numerous posters of missing seniors that were suffering dementia and dementia-related issues," he said. "And I saw nothing that indicated a recovery of any of these folks."
The cost of care
This is Bill Burr's first time wandering away from home. But there are incidents where seniors living with dementia go missing more than once, according to Caroline Cadirao, the director of the EOA.
Cadirao said cases of missing kūpuna with dementia typically happen in the person's own home, as opposed to a care home with staff and procedure.
Some care homes can be costly, but some are negotiable in price.
John McDermott, the state's long-term care ombudsman, said people can find a care home for $4,000 or $5,000 a month.
"That's probably a pretty good price, but they can go as high as $10,000 or $15,000 a month."
Mōʻiliʻili resident Faioso Leau has searched for her uncle, a 75-year-old with dementia, several times.
"If he's not supervised, he can forget why he's there and just start wandering off," she said.
Leau and her aunt would stay up all night looking for him, but he'd never gone missing for more than a day.
"He was discovered walking on the freeway by himself. The last time we found him, he was asleep in somebody's car," she said.
Faioso said she had tried medical bracelets, bells and other alarm systems. She even looked at buying a GPS tracker to place in the sole of his shoe, but it was too expensive for her.
Even her father, who is in his 80s, has dementia. And Leau had to make a difficult decision to place him in a care home.
"In our Pacific Islander families, because we do take care of our loved ones when they get old, I don't really have that much experience with knowing what's out there, knowing where to look, knowing what numbers to call."
But she's found support in Facebook groups to help her cope and receive advice from others who have loved ones with dementia.
"Once you start to realize that they have dementia, it becomes easier to just enjoy them and be able to accept that they can't remember and kind of roll with the punches a little bit more, instead of getting angry or upset or taking it personally," she said.
