Narrowing the search

Two years ago, Kelly Hurley was bagging leaves in her Franklin yard when her 4-year-old son, Michael, wandered off. She turned around for a second, she said, and he was gone.

After a frantic 15-minute search, Hurley was relieved to see a van pull into her driveway. A man working in a pizza parlor at the end of the street had brought Michael home -- using the child's directions -- after feeding him two slices of pizza and a soda when he appeared alone in the restaurant.

Hurley said she was lucky it was her older son: Michael, now 6, is autistic but has been diagnosed as "highly functional." His 5-year-old brother, Ryan, has a more severe developmental disability.

"The horror I experienced in those few minutes was a wake-up call for me," she said. "What would happen if it had been my younger son? He wouldn't even know he's lost, and he wouldn't make any attempts to get home."

Children like Ryan Hurley are the focus of a new initiative of the Franklin and Medway police departments called the Early Search Program, or ESP, which encourages parents of special-needs children to create detailed profiles of their sons and daughters, who might act or behave differently from other children if they get lost. Police officials hope to take the program to other communities in the region.

It works like this: At free workshops, parents put together binders about their children, compiling biographical information and physical descriptions, as well as street and topographical maps of the areas surrounding each child's home and favorite places. Questionnaires ask details about the child's disorder and behavior: Parents can note, for example, that their child probably would run from rescue dogs or likes to play at a nearby river.

Police hope that by having all this crucial information already compiled at a family's home, searchers can save valuable time early on that otherwise could be lost interviewing parents about these very details.

"There's nothing worse than questioning someone about their lost loved one and knowing you're not getting the information you need because of the stress of the situation," said Franklin police Officer Chris Baker, one of the program's creators. "All the info we're waiting for will be right here in these binders, and we can be off and running right away."

The idea for the program originated in a conversation between Baker, a member of the regional Metropolitan Special Tactics and Response Team, or Metro-STAR -- the 120-person unit that responds to most missing-child reports in the area -- and Franklin police Officer Jennifer Mitchell,, the mother of a 9-year-old autistic girl named Kristin.

After Mitchell grew concerned that her daughter might wander off, she and Baker began talking about what specific information searchers would need to know about her for an effective search.

"She wouldn't seek help," Mitchell said. "If searchers were calling her name, Kristin wouldn't respond. She has sensitivity issues, and if it were pouring rain, she might not be seeking shelter. If she heard a barking dog, she would move away."

Baker and Mitchell made a binder of information about Kristin designed to help police immediately tailor their search to her specific behaviors. They now use the binder as an example for other parents of special-needs children's who want to participate.

Currently, there are five police officers involved with the program: Baker; Mitchell; Mitchell's husband, Steve, who is a Medway police officer; Franklin Officer Dan MacLean; and Medway Officer Jay Brennan, who is also a member of the Metro-STAR unit. The Franklin and Medway police departments are sharing the cost of the binders and paying officers overtime for the workshops.

"It's costing us some dollars, but it's coming back to us exponentially if we can find someone in 20 minutes versus needing 200 officers for four days," said Franklin Police Chief Stephen Williams. "And the quicker we can reunite families, the better off everyone is: You can't put a price tag on that."

Richard Robison, executive director of the Federation for Children with Special Needs , a nonprofit organization that offers training and support for families with special-needs children, said it is very helpful to have police understand who these children are and the needs they have.

"If they have a relationship with the child or if they are able to be informed quickly about the child, that can solve a lot of problems because not every child can communicate well."

On a recent Tuesday night, the officers held the first parent workshop in a computer lab of Medway's Memorial Middle School. Twelve parents attended. "To get all this information down in one place is a good thing," said Franklin resident Bob Biagiotti, who has a disabled 8-year-old daughter. "Anything like this that can assist in a time of crisis is helpful."

Baker said that he expects other towns to adopt the program soon.

Robison, a Sudbury resident who has two children with disabilities, said he would be interested in seeing a program like ESP in his town.

"There are more and more kids with significant disabilities living in their home communities, and these communities need to ramp up and understand how to support these populations."

When he was asked about the program, Lieutenant Lou Griffith of the Framingham Police Department said it sounded worthwhile, and he noted that Framingham has a similar program for Alzheimer's patients: Care givers can fill out detailed forms that police keep on file in case the person becomes lost. Griffith said the forms could be altered to apply to children with special needs.

Hurley, who planned to complete binders for both her sons, said it was comforting to know that the information was there should emergency officials ever need it.

"Now if I have to call the police, I won't have to say, `No, wait; you don't understand, he has a disability.' They'll just know."