WIS News 10 - Columbia, South Carolina | Woman missing from Sumter facility -- again

Woman missing from Sumter facility -- again

SUMTER, SC (WIS) - Sumter police are asking for help finding a woman who walked away from an assisted living facility, and not for the first time.

Barbara Brunson is 66 years old, and for the past five years she's lived at Greene's Residential Care Facility.
    
But on Monday, employees, reported to the Sumter Police Department that she walked away. She hasn't been seen since.
    
And what's scarier, her medical chart shows she's mildly retarded, has dementia, schizophrenia, hypertension and is a diabetic.
    
Thursday we talked to the facility's administrator.

WIS News 10: How does something like this happen?
Administrator Carl Greene: Well it's hard to say because you got a lot of people, we provide a home-like environment for them and if they want to go to the store, we let them go to the store, the one's that can go. And she was one of the ones that could go to the store, you know.
    
The day Barbara went missing, Mr. Greene says she asked one of the employees for some hair products and told staff that she would wait for it on the front porch where residents often sit.

"She got tired of waiting I guess and she just walked off, which is what she does sometimes," says Greene.
    
Not just sometimes. Mr. Greene admits this has happened five times in the past six months.
    
In fact he told us she was missing just last week.

WIS News 10: When is the point when enough is enough?
Mr. Greene: She's been gone so many times, it's kind of hard to say, because you have people so long you get attached to them and so you don't have no deadline set on them. You keep trying to help them, you know?

Mr. Greene says he tried to transfer Barbara to another facility where there's a fence, but he says there are no openings.
    
While working on this story we learned about a program called the Silver Alert.
    
It's just like the Amber Alert, except the focus is on finding senior citizens like Barbara, who may have dementia.
    
We did some research and learned that Georgia and North Carolina have the silver alert but we do not have it in South Carolina.  

Reported by Trey Paul

Posted by Logan Smith