SAN DIEGO COUNTY, Calif. — Trying to locate lost loved ones is difficult enough. The San Diego County Sheriff’s Office hopes to make the search a little easier for those with special needs with an online registry called “Take Me Home.”
As an officer of 20 years and a father of three, Brian Herritt had an idea 10 years ago that has been a game changer in tracking down lost loved ones with special needs called the “Take Me Home.” Inside the system, information, including the missing person’s contact info, picture, medications and their sensory issues is listed.
“If we could save one person, it would make all the work worth it, if we could save one person,” said Brian Herritt, founder of AutismCop.com and the Director of Public Safety for Soboba Indian Reservation.
In the Take Me Home database, one signs up at Sdsheriff.net/tmh by inputting their relative’s information to better help law enforcement agencies track them down and connect them back to their family. Brian Herritt of Hemet knows it well since his 18-year-old son named Brian has severe autism.
“We were unloading groceries one day, and he actually ran away from us and was contacted about one block away by neighbors. Me and wife thought how do we let law enforcement know about our son if they encountered him, if they saw him, and if they came to our home, what can we do?” Herritt said.
The database has close to 2,000 signed up, where loved one’s information is only shared with law enforcement agencies and not the public.
“Say if it was my son, and if he was able to tell law enforcement that his name is Brian, then they would be able to run a query and say Brian, who is about 18 years old, and it would give them a list of everybody in the system that matches that criteria, and then they could cross reference that with a photo and know exactly who it is that we’re dealing with,” Herritt said.
That happened when an elderly man named Stan, who was disoriented, was found walking along Poway Road in the early morning on Dec. 17 and spotted by a Good Samaritan, who called police. Because Stan’s information and picture were in the Take Me Home database, deputies were able to reunite him with his wife before she even knew he was missing.
“To hear that somebody with Alzheimer’s was reunited with their family, and the system that we put together had some part to play in it, that is very humbling,” said Herritt, who’s lived in Hemet for 17 years.
Herritt says Take Me Home has been able to help over 50 other law enforcement agencies come up with their own system, but it needs more people to register, especially if there are close to 75,000 people listed in San Diego County with special needs and only 2,000 currently in the database.
“Our special needs family members, whether it’s Alzheimer’s, Autism, Down Syndrome, or whatever, they are our most prized people in our lives that we protect, why would you not do everything you can to keep them safe, why would you not enroll them in this system?” Herritt said.
Herritt says when he first pitched the database idea to Sheriff Bill Gore, he was an officer working for Palomar College, and the registry ended up costing the sheriff’s department $60,000 to get up and running.