Eghtesadi Malekzadeh, 83, keeps a suitcase packed in her daughter’s Bethesda condominium, every day telling her friends that she’s leaving for her native Iran — wandering off time and time again down Pooks Hill Road.
Stephen Roldan, 31, likes to leave his house to thumb through magazines in supermarkets and bookstores along Route 108 in Olney.
She has dementia, and does not speak English. He has Down syndrome, and makes sounds intelligible only to those who know him well.
Both are among the 31 clients of Project Lifesaver, the county police department’s program to find people who have wandered from their loved ones by honing in on a radio signal from special bracelets that police can pick up from up to a mile away on the ground and five miles from a helicopter.
In interviews with The Gazette, both families said the program, launched in 2006, is an immeasurable help.
But families that would need the free program, which costs the county $25,000, in the future are not as fortunate: because of budget cuts nearly all of the 15 pending applicants will be denied, said Eric Tehrani, one of two county officers who runs the program.
As of July 1, Project Lifesaver will be capped at 35 families — despite plans to quadruple the number of clients by 2011.
The program came to Montgomery County in 2006, when an autistic Silver Spring boy, 7, jumped out a window in his home and ran into the street, where he was struck by a truck and broke his leg.
After two years, the program is only beginning to find its stride, Tehrani said. His plan was to serve 50 clients by the end of this year; 100 by the end of 2009; and 160 clients by the end of 2010.
Since going county-wide in December, three clients have needed a police search, Tehrani said.
The more than 700 Project Lifesaver agencies nationwide have conducted 1,700 searches, on average taking 22-30 minutes, and not one has ended in a death or serious injury, said Tehrani, who is certified to train officers in other agencies how to implement the program. Unlike many other Project Lifesaver programs, Montgomery County does not charge a fee for the service.
But the cuts have prompted Tehrani to consider fundraisers and the possibility of charging a fee.
Besides the obvious benefits, Tehrani says the program also saves money. He points to a search in August for a Chevy Chase man with Alzheimer’s who was missing for three-and-a-half hours, requiring more than 30 officers, three helicopters and a K-9 unit to track him to Silver Spring — at a cost of about $10,000.
Had the man been in Project Lifesaver, it would have taken four officers about 30 minutes to find him, at a cost of $173, Tehrani said.
In 2006, county police fielded 1,650 missing person calls, with 820 reports written. Statistics available for 2007 were on the same pace.
Despite facing more than $600,000 in cuts, Police Chief J. Thomas Manger made a point to pull Project Lifesaver out of a department he has slated for elimination. What remains unclear is how well the program can run now that it will be decentralized to each police district.
On Thursday, Tehrani and Officer Laurie Reyes, the other coordinator, were transferred to patrol duties.
‘‘The program won’t exist if there isn’t someone to administer it full time,” he said, pointing out that he and Reyes have more training in dealing with those types of illnesses.
Shohreh Malekzadeh remembers with agonized precision the day her mother’s dementia took hold: March 31, 2007, when she was found by an Iranian cab driver wandering down Pooks Hill Road.
‘‘It was like she fell off a cliff,” she said. Sometimes, Eghtesadi questions whether Shohreh is really her daughter.
Even at The Promenade in Bethesda — a gated community with a concierge and security guards — her mother would wander to Pooks Hill Road, once getting as far as the Bethesda Hyatt’s Regency Hotel, another time to a strip mall on Rockville Pike.
Shohreh cried as she recalled the luck of the Iranian cab driver who picked up her mother and called someone who turned out to be her cousin.
‘‘If my tears could only tell how hard it is to take care of an older mom who just wanders off,” she said. ‘‘My mom gets lost in a dark, lonely way. She just loses contact. So I have to go keep grabbing and pulling her out.”
Stephen Roldan started wandering from the Olney apartment he shares with his parents about three years ago, going to supermarkets for the magazine aisle. His confidence quickly grew, and he started crossing Route 108, until one day in 2006 when he walked to Sherwood High School, where he had gone to school. That put him into Project Lifesaver.
He wandered again in January. Within 16 minutes, Project Lifesaver officers found him in the cafeteria at Montgomery General Hospital, several miles away.
His parents cannot envision getting by without it.
‘‘We probably would be forced to put him in an institution or something because we can’t force him to do anything; he’s too strong for us,” said her husband Hernando Roldan, 79.
‘‘I don’t think I would be able to survive,” said Marie Roldan, 73.
