Intensive Search Mounted––

Elderly Woman Found After Wandering From

The Homesteads During Power Outage

By Andrew Gorosko

The August 14 power outage had some unexpected consequences at The Homesteads at Newtown, an assisted living complex for the elderly at 166 Mt Pleasant Road in Hawleyville.

At 6:10 pm, Newtown police received a call from The Homesteads informing them that an elderly female resident was missing from Garden Walk, a special section of The Homesteads designed for people with forms of dementia such as Alzheimer’s disease. The enclosed facility is intended to provide a secure environment for people with such mental impairments, who tend to wander.

Missing was Bridgette Conway, age 71. Ms Conway became the focus of the largest local search for a missing person in years. At its height, the intensive effort involved about 50 police and firefighters searching through thickly wooded areas near The Homesteads, police said. After police learned of the missing woman, it took about six and one-half hours to find her in the woods.

Ms Conway’s disappearance posed the most serious situation for police during the course of the electrical outage, police Lieutenant James Mooney said.

“The [Homesteads] staff reported that the resident was able to exit the building through a door that became unsecured from the power outage,” police said in a statement. Some doors there have electrically operated locks.

Initially, town police searched the area near the 100-unit residential building at The Homesteads and also checked the 95,000-square-foot building’s interior for the missing Ms Conway.

Town police then called in the state police for assistance. The state police brought in several dog search units, including a bloodhound and German shepherds.

After the dog search teams were unable to locate Ms Conway, police called in firefighters from the Hawleyville, Newtown Hook and Ladder, and Stony Hill fire companies to help them search for the lost woman. The firefighters comprised multiple four-man search teams.

The arduous search was done in dense vegetation amid a power outage in the nighttime, with high-intensity flashlights providing light for the searchers, police explained. The heavy vegetation diminished the value of thermal imaging search tools, which detect heat patterns.

The Homesteads is situated on a 60-acre site, bounded by Mt Pleasant Road on the south and Pocono Road on the east. The property is a former sand-and-gravel mine, where dense vegetation grew after mining operations ceased years ago.

Lt Mooney said police used the town’s Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping, plus topographic maps to plot the courses that search teams would take across the terrain. Searchers correlated the positions of buildings, as depicted on GIS maps, with the lay of the land, as shown on topographic maps, he said.

After repeatedly criss-crossing the property in search patterns, a firefighter in one of the search teams encountered Ms Conway lying on the ground in a wooded area behind a line of 12 condominiums on the property at about 12:49 am, Friday August 15. Those vacant condos, which were built by The Homesteads, have never been occupied. Ms Conway was found several hundred yards from the point where she had left the 100-unit building.

Ms Conway had received minor injuries during her walk through the densely wooded area, resulting in the Newtown Volunteer Ambulance Corps transporting her to Danbury Hospital for treatment, police said.

Ms Conway was treated at the hospital and released, a hospital spokeswoman said.

Lt Mooney said the search made for a stressful situation. But “it ended on a positive note” with Ms Conway being found, he added.