Dementia patient left Ridgeland care facility in owner’s car. Family cites security issues
The Beaufort County family of a 67-year-old dementia patient is still reeling after the man managed to leave a Ridgeland hospice facility and drive the company owner’s unlocked car miles down the highway Tuesday afternoon, arriving at his families’ neighborhood confused and disoriented.
“It was the best case scenario,” said Olivia Shultz, the patient’s daughter. Her father, who stopped driving after being diagnosed with Lewy body dementia in 2021, was uninjured in the incident, she said, and the car did not appear to have crashed on the nearly five-mile route to Sun City.
Even still, Shultz says the situation reflects a security issue at Friends of Caroline Hospice, located off S.C. 170 in Jasper County. Although the family cannot pursue legal action against the facility due to a lack of monetary losses, she says her father’s escape — and the amount of time his absence went unnoticed among staff — is troubling.
“If you know someone has dementia, why wouldn’t you be more on guard?” Shultz told The Island Packet and Beaufort Gazette. She said Tuesday was the first time her father had wandered away from anywhere since his dementia diagnosis more than two years ago.
Lindsay Roberg, the president and CEO of Friends of Caroline Hospice, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
‘He wanted to go home’
Shultz dropped her father off at Friends of Caroline just before 11:30 a.m. Tuesday, planning to go shopping on Hilton Head with family before picking him up that evening. They had entrusted him to the facility once before in June, she said.
But around 2:30 that afternoon, Shultz got a call from Bluffton firefighters. Her father was at the Tidewatch Drive gate of Sun City, where the family lives, and appeared not to remember where he was or how he got there. Sun City security initially flagged down the man’s vehicle after noticing his car did not have an entrance decal.
“He wanted to go home, so he walked out the door,” Shultz said.
The car her father used in the attempt to drive home was registered to Roberg, the family soon discovered. The owner’s Forerunner had been left unlocked outside the Friends of Caroline facility with a spare set of keys inside, Shultz said, allowing her father to get inside and drive off.
Roberg later arrived to the scene, claiming her car and apologizing to the family, Shultz said.
The bulk of the family’s questions about Tuesday’s incident remain unanswered — how often their father had been checked on that afternoon, which door of the facility he walked out of, how long he was gone before staff noticed — but Shultz says the incident has damaged their trust in the company. They’ve now started the long process of updating their hospice and respite plans to find new caretakers for her father, she said.
“It was a traumatic experience for us all,” Shultz said. “I woudn’t want anyone else to have that same experience.”
This story was originally published July 23, 2023 at 6:00 AM.
