SCOTTSDALE, AZ — The 911 call came to Scottsdale police from a staffer at an assisted-living facility.
A resident was missing.
It was mid-afternoon on June 23. The temperature outside in the Phoenix area was in the triple digits.
“You know if he carries a cell phone on him?” the 911 operator asked.
“No, he doesn’t,” the caller said.
The missing resident was Robert John Pollmann. Everyone knew him as “Bob.”
The 85-year-old was a retired agriculture teacher from South Dakota, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2021.
For his safety, Bob’s family placed him in a memory care facility, first in his home state of South Dakota, and more recently in an assisted-living facility in Scottsdale, where he could be closer to his oldest daughter, Becky. He was there for two weeks before he was reported missing.
Becky Sadler and her husband, Brett, jumped in their car when they received a call from the care home and started searching.
The neighborhood where Bob lived was south of Shea Boulevard, a rural enclave of upscale homes bisected by desert and washes.
“You could easily take a wrong turn and get into some kind of dicey ground,” said Kassy Scrivner, a neighbor who searched.
Other neighbors joined in on bikes and four-wheelers. Police called in a helicopter, used a drone and brought in a dog to try to pick up his scent, according to police reports. Two days after he was missing, neighbors began texting each other that, sadly, Bob had been found dead in a wash.
What happened to Bob occurs more often than gets reported on the news.
The ABC15 Investigators poured through hundreds of pages of police reports, medical examiner reports and state health department records. ABC15 found at least a dozen cases of people who left their long-term care facilities or were left unsupervised outside and were all found dead in the heat.
The long-term care industry refers to unsupervised wandering that leads to residents leaving facilities as “elopements.” The exact number that occurs is unknown because no Arizona state agency tracks elopements.
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Some of those residents end up on the news when Silver Alerts are issued. Others don’t get any media attention. Retired mechanic Marion Apolinar was discovered unconscious outside his Phoenix care home last summer. A medical examiner’s report said the 82-year-old’s body temperature was 10 degrees higher than normal when he was found. He died a few days later.
“When someone elderly with long-term memory issues gets out, they're not going to last very long,” said Craig Knapp, an attorney who has represented families in elopement cases but is not involved in Marion or Bob’s case.
He said elopement cases have one common denominator: Lack of supervision.
He said not enough is being done to prevent people from wandering away.
“A lot of this stuff is just common sense,” he said. “Not that expensive to do and would prevent deaths.
Knapp said protections that should be in place include:
- Video cameras both inside and outside the care facility.
- Frequent checks on residents.
- GPS tracking devices on residents’ ankles or wrists.
But in Arizona, those types of details are up to each facility and aren’t mandatory under state law.
Danielle Dieterich, a supervised care/behavioral health expert with Robson Forensic in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, reviews elopement incidents to see what may have gone wrong.
She declined to comment specifically on Bob’s case but said generally, “You always want to balance the safety with an individual's autonomy and independence. So you want to support them in the way that's least restrictive for them.”
Dieterich said it’s possible to have precautions in place and everyone trained and “still have an elopement.”
In Bob’s case, he went missing on a Sunday afternoon. When he wasn’t immediately found, the Arizona Department of Public Safety issued a Silver Alert for him.
Two days after Bob was missing, a neighbor returned from an out-of-town trip. She lived northwest of Bob’s care home. She saw a man in the wash behind her home. He wasn’t moving. She called 911.
“I think it’s the elderly man that went missing,” she said, upset and crying in the 911 call.
Bob had been found in a wash, about 800 feet from the care home, according to police.
“That's when the emotions ran high,” said his daughter, Becky Sadler. “Both, you know, anger and disbelief. But also a little bit of relief that we at least found him, and he wasn't out there alone.”
She has spent the last weeks in a flood of memories.
“He was a loving, wonderful, giving man in everything that he did,” she told ABC15 in a recent interview in her Scottsdale home.
Her father was known for his huge garden, sharing beets and sweet corn with neighbors. He loved to sit in a lawn chair in the front yard, greeting people as they walked or biked.
A father of five, he took care of his wife of over 50 years, Janice, when doctors diagnosed her with blood cancer. She died in 2013.
For Becky, the loss of her father comes in waves.
“We weren't ready for him to be gone,” she said. “He was still such a big, major influence on our family.”
ABC15 reached out to Brookhaven on 131st Place, the assisted-living facility Bob was living at when he went missing. They declined to comment.
The Arizona Department of Health Services, the state agency that licenses care facilities, said in an email it is investigating. State records show the health department inspected and cited the facility after Bob’s death for failing to have strategies to ensure Bob’s safety. A state inspector also found the front door alarm to the care home was not functioning on the day of the inspection.
It was not the first time Brookhaven was cited for one of their door alarms, according to state records. Six months prior, a door leading to a back patio did not have an alarm, according to the inspection. This was corrected, the inspector said.
ABC15 will be doing more stories on elopements, including what some critics say are lax state regulations of care facilities and small fines for safety violations.
Email ABC15 Investigator Anne Ryman at: anne.ryman@abc15.com, call her at 602-685-6345, or connect on X, formerly known as Twitter, and Facebook.
