Tracking wandering children

Atlantic Beach resident Lesley Rothschild’s life has been made a bit easier, thanks to a tracking device she received from the Malverne Police Department with which she can monitor her non-verbal autistic son’s movements.

The device, which fits him like an ankle bracelet but can also be worn on the wrist, can find him anywhere within a radius of four miles. It has a transmitter that sends out a tracking signal.

Rothschild said that the disappearance of Avonte Oquendo — an autistic boy from Queens who wandered away from his Long Island City school in October 2013 and whose body washed ashore in College Point, Queens, the following January — spurred her to find some way to locate her son quickly in an emergency.

“My son is a non-verbal autistic child,” she said. “He has sensory issues. This ankle bracelet works well for him because he can’t remove it.”

She received the tracking device a couple of weeks ago through a statewide program, a partnership between New York state and Project Lifesaver International, which was announced by Gov. Andrew Cuomo in May. Thus far, the Malverne Police Department is the only one in Nassau County that is taking part in the program — and the department contacted Rothschild when it heard about her interest in the device.

Rothschild recalled two frightening instances when her son slipped away, and the tracking device would have helped her find him faster. “One time, I found him in Reynolds Channel, in the water with a dog,” she said. “The other time, he was walking around Atlantic Beach in the streets, against traffic. We have the funding through New York state. I thought, ‘We have the funding, so let’s get this.’”

The partnership makes life-saving equipment and training available to 50 law enforcement agencies to speed up and improve searches for missing children. The state is providing police departments with nearly 600 Project Lifesaver tracking devices for special-needs children under 18 who have an increased risk of wandering and getting lost.

Gene Saunders, chief executive officer and founder of Project Lifesaver, which is headquartered in Port St. Lucie, Fla., said he was pleased to be working with the state. “Project Lifesaver is a proven nonprofit program which has resulted in its members rescuing almost 3,000 people in 16 years,” he said. “New York has demonstrated, in working with Project Lifesaver, that it cares for its citizens and will work to protect them.”

The state purchased the technology using approximately $253,000 from its Missing and Exploited Children Special Revenue fund. The device costs $300 for five years of use, and $2 per month for batteries.

The Herald’s original story on the Malverne Police’s wanderer technology can be found at http://bit.ly/1MkUNNi.

Rossana Weitekamp contributed to this article.