MEDINA, Ohio — A 78-year-old Medina County man with dementia found himself in a precarious position Thursday evening: stuck in a swamp.
For a few hours, all his family knew was that senior citizen went missing after he went outside.
Eventually, he was found and rescued thanks in part to the activation of a specialized Medina County unit called Child Abduction Response Team (CART). The team searches for missing kids and adults.
The man's wife contacted the Medina County Sheriff's Office and reported that her husband was last seen picking up sticks in the front yard before he apparently wandered away.
Deputies activated CART, which consists of local police officers, firefighters and emergency management officials, according to Medina County Captain Kris Conwill.
The focus quickly turned to a nearby swamp with high brush. Granger Township Assistant Fire Chief Shane Berger began searching with concern.
"You don't know whether you're going to come across a deceased body or if he's still alive," Berger said.
Berger said it was was clear that some of the equipment typically used for searches would not be useful in this case.
"We had our Gator [utility vehicle or UTV] respond out here too, but where he was located, we couldn't even get a Gator in there," Berger said. "It was just too much brush."
Luckily, Berger heard the man's voice and yelled for him to keep talking.
"I had to almost crawl just to get him," Berger said.
The veteran firefighter found the senior after 8 p.m., in the dark, stuck in the mud up to his ankles.
Berger, along with other firefighters and deputies, worked together to get the man unstuck and assisted him back to his home. Body camera video shows the man with arms around his rescuers.
He was assessed by a squad on the scene, but his wife declined a hospital transport as his medical power of attorney, according to the police report.
"We were fortunate last night to find him alive," Berger said. "It took us probably a good half hour to get him from there out to the street."
In 2021, News 5 covered another incident in Medina County where CART used drones and cell phone pings to track down a 31-year-old man who failed to return to a group home.
After a four-hour search, he was found cold but unharmed in a wooded area in Lodi.
"A CART team brings a lot of different resources. In addition to manpower, they have UTVs. They have drones. All of those resources were being deployed last night," Conwill said.
According to Conwill, CART has been activated approximately 30 times in recent years, leading to the safe return of about 12 missing people.
"Many times the person is in a position of peril. They have no ability to help themselves anymore. If left out there for an extended period of time, it could have been a different circumstance," he said.
Rescue crews are glad the situation involving the senior stuck in the swamp had a happy ending and brought relief to his family.
"I do know they were grateful. They were grateful that he was checked out by EMS and able to return home without any significant injury," Conwill said.
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