Local law enforcement officers credit a flurry of Facebook posts, Twitter messages and a news alert sent through a smartphone app for their ability to find a 70-year-old Redmond man with dementia who wandered more than 100 miles away from home.

“Social media is becoming such a big part of our society these days,” said Lt. Keith Knight with the Redmond Police Department. “It’s another tool that we have available to us in law enforcement.”

When Robert Lee Stofle disappeared on Jan. 2, Knight sent out a series of messages through the department’s Twitter and Facebook accounts. The posts included a recent picture of the Redmond resident and a description of the 1999 Dodge Durango he was last seen driving.

Knight also shared this information with three local media outlets — The Bulletin, KBND NewsTalk FM 100.1 and KTVZ Newschannel 21 — that made similar posts through their social media accounts and smartphone apps.

Less than three hours after the first message went out, two women who saw these media alerts spotted Stofle’s truck as they passed through western Clackamas County on their way home from Portland. They saw Stofle on the side of the road more than an hour later and gave him a ride back to the Redmond Police Station so he could be reunited with his family.

“(This story) represents the positive side of the Internet,” said KTVZ’s Digital Media Director Barney Lerten, who sent out the news alert Tiana Gehrke and Tayla Schmid saw before they spotted the truck. The two women could not be reached to comment for this story.

The story of Robert Stofle’s disappearance and the role social media played in finding him so quickly three weeks ago will also likely factor in to a series of discussions law enforcement organizations across the state will be having this year if a bill sponsored by state Sen. Tim Knopp, R-Bend, makes its way through the state legislature this winter.

That bill would require every police department and sheriff’s office in Oregon to craft a series of policies — including rules dictating when and how they should use social media or reach out to media outlets — to serve as a guide they can use if a vulnerable senior like Stofle wanders away from home.

“There are a lot of police departments that don’t have a policy to address this situation,” said Jon Bartholomew, public policy director with the Alzheimer’s Association’s Oregon Chapter. “If this bill passes then everybody will have a plan.”

Patsy Stofle, Robert Stofle’s wife, thought her daughter, Charity Holloway, had taken the family’s truck out to run some errands when she heard it start up shortly after 10 a.m. Jan. 2 and pull out of her home’s driveway.

But she soon realized that wasn’t the case when Holloway yelled down to her from an upstairs room and they both flew into a panic.

“We were frantic,” she said, explaining that her husband had tried to wander away from home in the past but never made it out the front door or past the front yard before somebody stopped him and brought him back inside.

Patsy Stofle said her first reaction was to call the Redmond Police Department and file a missing persons report, a process she said police officers moved forward with quickly because of her husband’s mental condition and the fact that he left in the family’s truck.

Meanwhile, her daughter posted information about Robert Stofle’s disappearance on her Facebook profile page so her friends and family members could keep an eye out for her missing father and would know to call her if they crossed paths.

“(Facebook’s) a really fast way to get a hold of people you know,” said Patsy Stofle.

Knight said he’s also been amazed by the amount of response he gets when he uses the department’s Facebook page to communicate with members of the community since he set up the page this summer.

He said the department has found at least four of the seven people featured on the page’s Wanted Wednesday posts, which publish the names and mug shots of people with outstanding warrants. It’s also running a 71 percent success rate when it comes to identifying people and vehicles featured in security camera footage or other images that Knight posts on the page to help solve cases that would normally go cold.

“With the amount of contacts we’ve been getting through Facebook (posting information about Stofle’s disappearance) seemed like a natural fit,” Knight said, explaining that it was the first time he had ever posted any information about a missing person on the department’s Facebook page.

According to the department’s Facebook page, more than 150 people shared Knight’s original post about Stofle’s disappearance with the hundreds if not thousands of people who belong to their personal Facebook networks. The posts sent out by The Bulletin, KTVZ and KBND reached a combined audience of more than 13,000 people on Twitter alone and were re-tweeted and shared hundreds of times as well.

Knight said the two women who found Robert Stofle saw KTVZ’s news alert right before they saw the Stofle family’s Dodge Durango on the side of U.S. Highway 26 in Zigzag, a small community in Clackamas County that’s about 11 miles west of the Mt. Hood Skibowl.

They reported the sighting to the Redmond Police Department, which in turn called the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office for help, and continued on their way home before they came across Robert Stofle himself standing on the side of the road outside Warm Springs.

“When those two ladies called and said they saw the truck, we were so grateful,” Patsy Stofle said.

She said her daughter had headed out toward the Madras/Warm Springs area on her own search for Stofle’s truck, but turned around before she got close to where he was spotted because she didn’t think it had enough gas to get more than 40 or 50 miles away from home.

“If he had taken a wrong turn into the woods somewhere I don’t know how long it would have taken to find him,” said Patsy Stolfe, who thinks her husband hitchhiked to get some gas and forgot where he parked the car when he was spotted in Warm Springs.

Bartholomew, with the Alzheimer’s Association’s Oregon chapter — which shared the Bulletin’s post about Stofle’s disappearance with its 1,434 followers on Twitter — said timing can make a huge difference when it comes to finding a person who has wandered off.

According to his group’s research, about 60 percent of people who have dementia and wander away from home will die if they aren’t found within 24 hours, and 80 percent of them will die if they aren’t found within 72 hours. But even with these statistics, he cautioned about using social media every time a vulnerable senior wanders away from home.

“Most people who wander off don’t go very far from home,” Bartholomew said, explaining Robert Stofle’s case was a rarity because he drove away. “They usually stay pretty close by.”

Because most seniors who wander off tend to stay within a few miles of homes, Bartholomew cautioned against making massive social media alerts a common practice because of privacy concerns and because it could give rise to false sightings that could distract law enforcement officers from their search.

He hopes law enforcement agencies will consider these factors when they set about to craft the policies and procedures called for in Knopp’s legislation. But while it’s not specifically called for in the bill, Bartholomew said he would also like to see these discussions lead to a single statewide system law enforcement agencies could use in rare cases like Stofle’s when a vehicle is involved and it would be appropriate to get the word out as quickly and as widely as possible.

“Our hope is that you could sign up for social media alerts (to get information in these cases) like the Amber Alert system,” he said, referring to a national system used to find missing and exploited children that’s been on Facebook since 2011 and Twitter since Jan. 17.

— Reporter: 541-617-7816, mmclean@bendbulletin.com