PIERMONT — State and local law enforcement successfully rescued a 22-year-old Piermont woman with autism who had gone missing on Wednesday.
The woman’s mother alerted police at 10 a.m. that her daughter was missing and had last been seen at 1 a.m.
The mother, who Piermont Police Chief Brandon Alling said is her daughter’s legal guardian, told Alling that something like this had “never happened before.”
Alling, who led the search operation, declined to identify the missing woman.
Rescuers were concerned for the woman’s safety especially given that “the information we received was (she was only wearing) a pair of sneakers, no jacket and, basically, unknown clothing beyond that,” Alling said.
Temperatures Wednesday morning hovered around zero degrees, he said.
Initially, Alling located shoe tracks in fresh snow in the driveway on Barton Road that “turned around and went up behind the residence into the woods.” He also called for additional resources to assist in the search.
New Hampshire Fish and Game sent an officer and a lieutenant. Also joining the operation, both on foot and patrolling the roads, were the Grafton County Sheriff’s Department, Orford Police Department and the Wentworth (N.H.) Police Department.
From the residence, the search party continued up through the woods, toward Peaked Mountain, as snow rose to knee-deep levels in some places and the woman’s tracks at times blended with deer prints.
“There definitely wasn’t a linear progression through the woods from point A to point B,” he said.
He estimated it was roughly two miles and a couple hours of tracking before the woman’s tracks appeared to stop at a “steep ridge.”
From what Alling could tell by impressions in the snow, “it looked like she had tumbled down that ridge.” Whether or not she had fallen, there were clear indications she had descended it somehow.
From the ridge, they tracked further on and parallel to Indian Pond Road, Alling said. It was there the underbrush began to rustle.
“She came out from behind some bushes and was very cooperative with us,” he said.
It was around noon when the search team located her.
“She was conscious, breathing and alert,” he said. She was clothed, but not dressed for winter.
“She was very wet,” he said. “She looked cold.”
The woman did “acknowledge that she didn’t know where she was,” Alling said.
Alling said rescuers brought her out to Indian Pond Road where Upper Valley Ambulance met them to evaluate her. The woman was uninjured, he said, and did not need to be transported to the hospital.
“She was released from the ambulance into her mother’s care,” he said.