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An elderly Maryland woman is alive and back safe with her family, after wandering away from home into a thickly wooded area for hours on Monday.
Rescuers found her using a helicopter just as the last minutes of daylight were slipping away. The helicopter, known as Guardian, is part of the Prince George’s County Police Aviation Section. Assigned officers are trained to see things from the air that most people might not see from ten feet away.
“The missing elderly female had left the house at about eight o’clock in the morning, and it was going on, I think about three or four o’clock in the afternoon,” said Corporal Jessica Johnson with the Prince George’s County Police Aviation Section. “Detective had let me know that she was a walker. She might have been elderly, but she was a speedy Walker.”
The search area included acres of heavy woods off Nottingham Road in Croom, Maryland.
Johnson knew the helicopter’s FLIR thermal imaging camera would face challenges that included the nature of the terrain and the simultaneous ground search.
“That was the other side of this challenge was I knew that there were officers on the ground, I knew that it was farmland, deer in the woods and the other canine search teams that were in various parts of the woods,” she said.
Bearing all that in mind, Johnson was able to rapidly pick through the data coming in until she saw the image she was looking for.
“At first, I wasn’t sure, because I saw khaki pants, and I was like, okay, that might be a search team,” she said. “But when I realized that it was just her in the woods, it wasn’t a team, it wasn’t an officer, it wasn’t an animal, and she did look kind of like she was walking around kind of confused.”
The Prince George’s County Police Aviation Unit is considered one of the top five in the nation and regularly wins awards for its work.