The tragic case last month of Jaden Dremsa highlights the dangers facing autistic children who wander from home - particularly in overwhelmingly rural and sparsely populated states like Maine. The Waterboro teenager, who was diagnosed with Aspergers syndrome, disappeared May 8, prompting a massive search. His body was found in a nearby lake nine days later. There are estimated to be more than 3,000 children and young adults in Maine listed as having an autism spectrum disorder. For their parents, stories like Dremsa's represent a recurring nightmare - but one that could be prevented with a relatively simple piece of technology.
Samantha and Ben McDorr are practicing reading skills with their 8-year-old daughter, Sage. Sage has Aspergers - an autism spectrum disorder characterized by difficulties in social interaction, non-verbal communication and behavior which is often repetitive and obsessive.
"She has wandered away from the house a couple of times," Samantha McDorr says. "Luckily we have noticed within a couple of minutes and have been able to catch her. We have a security system in our home that's not to keep people out, it's to keep her inside."
This "opposite of a burglar alarm" alerts the McDorrs if Sage tries to leave the house with a beeping sound. "Her gate in her bedroom is locked at night and we have an alarm on that," Mcdorr says. "We have a dead bolt up top."
McDorr says more than 90 percent of parents of autistic children worry about them wandering off. "I mean, that's a huge rate and that's a huge worry. If a child wanders, if you haven't found them in 24 hours then the chances of it being a good outcome are not very good."
Which is why the McDorrs have launched a fund-raising campaign to bring Project Lifesaver to their community. That's the name of a program which supplies bracelet-like devices worn on the wrist or the ankle of people - primarily those suffering with Alzheimers or autism - who are considered at risk of wandering off by themselves.
Project Lifesaver was set up 15 years ago by Gene Saunders, who, at the time, was a police commander in Chesapeake, Virginia, growing increasingly frustrated with the difficulty of locating Alzheimers patients who had gone missing.
The answer to the problem, he says, came from an unusual quarter. "So I'm looking around for alternatives," Saunders recalls. "I happened to come across a brochure the sheriff sent me concerning the tracking of wildlife."
Saunders adapted the wildlife-tracking gizmo for use on people, and the result was Project Lifesaver International, a private company which supplies devices to 1,300 agencies in the U.S., Canada and Australia.
The technology behind the project, he says, is relatively straightforward, and has a 100 percent success rate, as far as he knows. "Each transmitter sends off a radio signal on a predetermined and set frequency. You have a radio receiver you tune to that frequency. You pick up that signal and you track to it," he explains.
The advantage of using radio waves is that they emit a stronger signal than GPS tracking devices, a signal that's less easily lost. The disadvantage is that the range is much shorter - between one and five miles, says Saunders, depending on the environment.
Jason Moen is deputy police chief in Auburn, which is about to become the first community in Maine to adopt Project Lifesaver.
Setting up the project is quite labor intensive, he says, because they have to be sure the wearer of the device - which looks a bit like a wristwatch and costs around $350 - will not try to remove it.
Nevertheless, he says, the radio wave technology makes it ideally suited to performing local searches. "With our local searches time is critical," Moen says. "To get set up in an area, get a perimeter set up, get our searches started, with this equipment we're going to be able to be much more efficient with our searches and not have such a drain on the resources."
"I mean, they're life savers basically," says Cathy Dionne, director of the Autism Society of Maine."When you have a family who has a child who is a wanderer or what we call a 'bolter,' they need to be able to know where their child is."
Especially, says Dionne, when you consider that many autistic children like to be around water. "They will seek and find a water source, and drowning is a leading cause of death," she says. "So it is that important."
This month Project Lifesaver is also being rolled out in the southern Maine community of Ogunquit, as well as in Auburn, and Samantha McDorr would like Brunswick to follow suit.
"I think it would ease a lot of parents' minds, it would assist first responders," McDorr says. "It not only teaches them how to use the equipment, but it also teaches them how to deal with this population when they find them."
The McDorrs however have a financial mountain to climb. Both Auburn and Oqunquit's efforts are being funded by federal grants. No federal dollars appear to be coming Brunswick's way, however, which means the McDorrs need to raise about $6,000 through the crowd-funding Web site GoFundMe to pay for the necessary equipment and training.
So far they've raised barely a tenth of that.
In Auburn, meanwhile, an informational session regarding the rollout of Project Lifesaver is being held at 6 p.m. on Monday, June 9, at the Auburn Public Library.