Four months ago a 14-year-old boy with autism ran out an open door of his school in Queens, N.Y., and, to those who loved him, vanished.<\/p>\n
Through the following weeks he became known to everyone else. Each morning I walked Ned to the train to send him to school and heard the subway loudspeaker:<\/p>\n
\u201cPolice are looking for Avonte Oquendo. He is 14 and suffers from severe autism. He was last seen wearing jeans and a striped shirt\u2026\u201d Posters blossomed all over New York; Autism Speaks helped with a $70,000 reward. Police called the disappearance \u201cdistressing\u201d and admitted that several officers were something that no police department likes to admit about its officers: emotionally involved.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey found that kid,\u201d Ned told me over the phone the other day. \u201cThey found Avonte. Pretty bummed about that.\u201d<\/p>\n
The medical examiner\u2019s office confirmed on Jan. 21 that remains found along the East River matched Avonte\u2019s DNA. He was last seen heading toward the East River 11 miles from where the body was found. Cause of death has yet to be determined.<\/p>\n
Cause of death was a condition most don\u2019t think is fatal.<\/p>\n
\u201cForty-nine percent of all children with autism wander. One-third of them are non-verbal,\u201d Michael Rosen, EVP of Autism Speaks said in local news reports, which added that Rosen\u2019s 26-year-old son has autism.<\/p>\n
\u201cNicky would end up across the street, on roofs of other houses when he was young,\u201d Rosen said. \u201cEventually, we had to put locks on the top of every door in the house. And that\u2019s how families with autism live. You can\u2019t turn your back for one second.\u201d<\/p>\n
Alex, Ned\u2019s older brother, hasn\u2019t bolted in months, but he used to vanish frequently from our apartment with a slam of the front door. Soon the phone rang with a neighbor telling us Alex was inside his or her apartment, sometimes turning on every light.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m so sorry. I hope he didn\u2019t damage anything…\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWell no. He just used my bathroom.\u201d<\/p>\n
Once on a Sunday morning he bolted from our apartment. I stuck my head into our building stairwell and listened under I heard an echoing slam and pounded to the steps. I found him three floors up. Through the open door of this lady\u2019s apartment \u2013 she lived alone and expected guests for brunch \u2013 I heard her on her phone with the guard at our building\u2019s front desk.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes, can you help me? There\u2019s a strange autistic boy in my apartment\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s my son,\u201d I said to her, steering Alex out by his arm. \u201cI\u2019m so sorry.\u201d No problem. Alex also said I\u2019m sorry to me and to her, over and over. How did she know he was autistic?<\/p>\n
He bolts outside, too: Once Alex got bear-hugged by a cop just a few feet from the cars in a busy intersection. Another time he bolted from a Central Park playground and turned up 10 blocks south in the zoo garage, bumming Fritos from the maintenance crew. In the depths of the bolting, I used to wonder if Alex would bolt out the front door of the building and run into Fifth Avenue.<\/p>\n
Sometimes I tried to write thank-you notes to neighbors. \u201cWe\u2019re sorry Alex intruded on you. We\u2019ve talked to him about it, and it won\u2019t happen again. Thank you for your understanding and kindness\u2026\u201d Usually I got about to \u201chappen\u201d before crumpling the paper. What difference was a note going to make to neighbor who knows who he is and says it\u2019s okay if Alex busts in to use their bathroom? What on earth makes me think I won\u2019t have another chance to write this note?<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not the only one wondering about wandering. Senator Charles Schumer has introduced legislation \u2013 \u201cAvonte\u2019s Law\u201d \u2013 to provide tracking devices \u201cand expand support services for families with children who have ASD or other developmental disorders in which \u2018bolting\u2019 from parents or caregivers is common.\u201d<\/p>\n
The law would also provide training and other resources to schools and local entities (see \u201cpolice\u201d) to help them \u201creact to a situation similar to Avonte\u2019s.\u201d The tracking devices cost about $85 and a few dollars more a month to operate. The legislation would allocate $10 million for the program and interested parents could pick up the devices free. Schumer called it \u201ca high-tech solution to an age-old problem.\u201d I call it pennies for a miracle.<\/p>\n
Many children with autism are drawn to bodies of water because they seem soothing, Rosen added in news reports.<\/p>\n
We used to pile stuff in front of our front door before going to bed. A chair, on the chair an old coffee can that will fall with a waking racket if Alex moves it. Sometimes a second chair. We tried alarms; Alex used to watch as we stretched up to turn them on and off. In his early morning bolts, he\u2019d shut our bedroom door first.<\/p>\n
Yeah, we tried to have locks installed to keep someone inside. \u201cYou want it how?\u201d the locksmith said. \u201cI guess I could do it upside down so the bolt goes the other way \u2026\u201d He couldn\u2019t \u2013 NYC fire regs forbid a key lock on the inside of an apartment.<\/p>\n
Bolting\u2019s numbers, according to AWAARE (Autism Wandering Awareness Alerts Response Education) and the National Autism Association:<\/p>\n
\u00b7 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a074% of children with autism run or wander from their own home or from someone else\u2019s home;<\/p>\n
\u00b7 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a040% run or wander from stores;<\/p>\n
\u00b7 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a029% run or wander from schools;<\/p>\n
\u00b7 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Close calls with traffic injuries were reported for 65% of missing children;<\/p>\n
\u00b7 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Close calls with drowning were reported for 24% of the missing children;<\/p>\n
\u00b7 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a056% of parents reported running as one of the most stressful behaviors they have had to cope with as caregivers of a child with autism; and<\/p>\n
\u00b7 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a050% of parents reported receiving little guidance on preventing or addressing this common behavior.<\/p>\n
Make that 51% as Jill and I stood on the sidewalk outside the locksmith\u2019s. \u201cI feel like I\u2019ll never sleep again,\u201d she said. She did, of course, one day after bolting had drifted behind Alex on a float down a river only seems to understand. God knows I\u2019ve never been able to predict what\u2019s behind the next bend.<\/p>\n
A boy gave his life to begin the war against bolting, a boy who will never understand what kind of hero he was. Hundreds attended his funeral. Distressed police now know a notch more about a population they can\u2019t protect, a population born \u2013 as some races are born having to fight prejudice \u2013 with disadvantages we as a species can\u2019t just enlighten ourselves out of.<\/p>\n
Overnight the posters vanished. His family will sleep again, eventually, though never in the same way. Their alarms won\u2019t go off and their doors won\u2019t slam in the middle of the night. The lights of their neighbors will stay dark.<\/p>\n
Yes, a long long time it\u2019s been on Super Bowl night when I sit in a rocking chair in my father-in-law\u2019s living room, watching the game for one of those infamous seconds as Jill appears in front of me says, \u201cJeff, Alex just left.\u201d I shoot up to be sorry again. Pounding toward the back stairs I realize that at least tonight wherever Alex goes someone ran there before him.<\/p>\n
Jeff Stimpson, 49, is a native of Bangor, Maine, and lives in New York with his wife Jill and two sons. He is the author of Alex: The Fathering of a Preemie and Alex the Boy: Episodes From a Family\u2019s Life With Autism (both available on Amazon). He maintains a blog about his family at\u00a0http:\/\/jeffslife.tripod.com\/alextheboy<\/a>, and is a frequent contributor to various sites and publications on special-needs parenting, such as Autism-Asperger\u2019s Digest, Autism Spectrum News, and The Autism Society news blog.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Four months ago a 14-year-old boy with autism ran out an open door of his school in Queens, N.Y., and, to those who loved him, vanished. Through the following weeks he became known to everyone else. Each morning I walked Ned to the train to send him to school and heard the subway loudspeaker: \u201cPolice […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"give_campaign_id":0,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-special-needs-fathers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatherville.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatherville.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatherville.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatherville.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatherville.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/fatherville.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":106,"href":"https:\/\/fatherville.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105\/revisions\/106"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatherville.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatherville.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatherville.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}