Powered paraglider pilot aids in rescue of lost man
A Rocklin man used a bird's eye view to help find an Alzheimer's patient who had been missing for more than 16 hours during the Labor Day weekend.
Greg Petersen took to the sky with his motorized paraglider at the crack of dawn Monday and spotted the 80-year-old man, who had become lost Sunday after wandering away from the Thunder Valley Casino near Lincoln.
"He was lying in a clump of bushes," said Petersen, 40, who uses a backpack-style aircraft engine to get airborne in a sport called powered paragliding. "He had his arms folded across his chest like he was taking a nap."
The Placer County Sheriff's Department withheld the man's name. It credited Petersen with making the rescue.
"He did a great job of finding the man," sheriff's Lt. Karl Fulenwider said.
The missing man, who is from San Jose, had come to the gaming casino with his wife on Sunday, Fulenwider said.
She stopped in a restroom for a few minutes and when she came out about 3 p.m., her husband was gone, Fulenwider said.
Security officers at the casino searched the crowded building and the parking lots over the next nine hours, Fulenwider said.
They called the sheriff's office at midnight, but a new search team also couldn't find the man, the lieutenant said.
At 6:30 a.m., a motorcycle officer who was part of the search came across Petersen, a general contractor who was using private property owned by a friend for paragliding activities.
Petersen, eager to help with the search, took to the air. He found the missing man in a brushy area about 1 1/2 miles south of the casino, he said.
"I searched for about an hour before I spotted him," Petersen said. "I had no radio or contact with the searchers, so I went back to the front of the casino to where the sheriff's officers were and told them."
Petersen went back into the air and hovered over the bushes where the Alzheimer's patient was sleeping until the search teams arrived on motorcycles and in four-wheel drives, he said.
Fulenwider said the lost man seemed perplexed.
"He was curious as to what the activity around him was all about," the lieutenant said.