ORLANDO, Fla. — Tens of thousands of Florida families count on assisted living facilities to take care of their loved ones. But a Channel 9 investigation found more than 6,000 reported cases where a resident has wandered away from one of these facilities in the last decade.
Just this March, Channel 9 was on the scene as Ocoee Police officers and Orange County deputies searched for any sign of 90-year-old Shirley Anderson by the air, on the ground and even in a nearby retention pond after she wandered away from her assisted living facility.
“I was just like actually numb,” said Anderson’s daughter Jamie Fagan.
Law enforcement shared images from surveillance of Anderson leaving the Inspired Living Assisted facility in Ocoee on the night of March 12. She was stranded out in the elements overnight.
“The doors were supposed to be locked. There was supposed to a person at the desk,” Fagan said.
Fagan says she got the call the next day saying her mother had been missing since the night before.
“How did she walk down the hall at midnight? And go out the front door at that hour of the night?,” Fagan said.
The search began to feel more like a recovery mission.
Then, 19 hours after she wandered off, officers found Anderson inside a fenced-in construction site.
“She was directly across the street the whole time,” Fagan said.
Fagan still doesn’t know what exactly happened to her mom in that time, but now Anderson is in a wheelchair, receiving care at another facility.
Fagan blames the trauma for her mother’s condition deteriorating.
“I mean this should not have happened. And it shouldn’t happen to any family, really,” Fagan said.
Channel 9 found it’s happened to thousands of families, and Fagan’s family is one of the luckier ones.
In Volusia County in 2021, an 89-year-old man was hit by a car and died after wandering away from a facility.
In Palm Beach County in 2023, a 66-year-old man with dementia was found dead in a canal.
In Leon County, a 100-year-old woman died of hypothermia Christmas morning in 2020.
9 Investigates found that just in the last 10 years, more than 6,660 cases reported to the state where a resident wandered from a Florida assisted living facility. It amounts to about 55 residents walking out of a facility each month.
“Obviously, I think there needs to be better staffing, better security measures, obviously. There needs to better training,” Fagan said.
Florida law requires facilities to assess and identify residents who are at risk for wandering away and to have procedures in place for when they do.
“But yet it still does continue to happen,” said Lindsay Peterson, research assistant professor at the School of Aging Studies at the University of South Florida.
She says understaffing is also a problem.
“In some cases, these assisted living communities may not have the security they need for the specific vulnerabilities of the residents that they have,” Peterson said.
Fagan said her mother was identified as at-risk before she wandered away, yet she still managed to escape the facility.
Peterson said she thinks Florida needs a task force to better regulate the industry as the large baby boomer generation begins needing this kind of care.
“Given what we have today, think about what might happen in the future when that population of people with dementia is double,” Peterson said.
In March, Inspired Living promised a full investigation, but the facility has not revealed how Anderson wandered away or any changes that have been made since.
In a statement, the facility said they wouldn’t answer WFTV’s questions because of “privacy and confidentiality concerns.”
Inspired Living’s full statement says, “Thank you for your questions and your interest that we share in our residents’ safety and well-being. While we would love to provide you with the answers you are looking for, there are privacy and confidentiality concerns at play that prevent us from sharing those details. As a facility dedicated to the safety, comfort, and wellbeing of residents, we can say that we take situations like this extremely seriously and continue to evaluate and impose high standards of protocol to that end.”
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