WHITMAN, MASS. (WHDH) - A Whitman Police Department K-9 officer and the police and fire officials who assisted in the search are being credited with locating an elderly woman who was found unresponsive in the woods near her home Tuesday night.
Officers responding to a report of a missing 71-year-old woman around 6 p.m. learned that the resident had last been seen around 8:30 a.m. and likely had left her home on foot with her cellphone and no jacket, according to a joint statement issued by Whitman Police Chief Timothy Hanlon and Whitman Fire Chief Timothy Grenno.
About an hour later, the woman’s cellphone was pinged in the area of Westwood Drive and a K-9 officer was called to the scene and found the woman unresponsive in a wooded area about 250 yards from her home, face down in a briar patch with her legs tangled in roots.
Hanlon said the woman’s clothes were muddy and wet and her skin was cold to the touch.
After draping a coat over the woman and putting a knit hat on her head, the woman was taken out of the woods and was transported to South Shore Hospital, where she was in stable condition Thursday morning.
“This was great work by our responding officers and the Plymouth County Sheriff’s K9,”Hanlon said in a statement. “We don’t know how long she had been outside for but it was cold and rainy all day. Thankfully we found her when we did and hopefully she is going to be okay.”
Grenno said, “Thanks to the quick response and thorough search by the Whitman Police Department and Plymouth County Sheriff’s Department, we were able to arrive on the scene and administer care to the woman. Our medics were able to rewarm the patient, whose body temperature had dropped drastically low, and provide further care while transporting her to the hospital where additional care would be administered.”
(Copyright (c) 2024 Sunbeam Television. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)