A woman in her 90s wandering alone in a Seoul subway station late at night received help from a station employee, who contacted her legal guardians and ensured she got home safely, according to Seoul Metro on Friday.
Ra Gwang-su, an employee at Dongdaemun History and Culture Park Station, saw on surveillance cameras that the elderly woman was walking by herself at around 11:23 p.m. on Monday. He approached her but struggled to communicate with her due to her dementia.
Ra had employees call the police and persuaded the woman to accompany him to the station's customer service center. Officers who arrived on the scene found that she had an identification tag for dementia patients, through which they were able to find the contact information of her legal guardians.
"When I saw a senior citizen wandering alone late at night, I thought of my own mother, who suffered from dementia for seven to eight years ... I merely did my duty as an employee (of the station), and I'm just glad she got home to her family before it was too late," Ra said, adding that he texted her legal guardians afterwards to make sure she was all right.
In 2024, 13 dementia patients went missing at stations run by Seoul Metro, the main operator of the Seoul subway system, according to the company.
National Police Agency data show that 14,677 people with dementia were reported missing across the country in 2023, 83 of whom were later found dead. Between 2019 and 2023, an average of 13,306 dementia patients were reported missing annually, with around 97 of them later being found dead each year.
Of the dementia patients who went missing last year, 23 have never been found, up from 10 in 2022 and one in 2019.
Seoul Metro has distributed instruction manuals to all stations under its authority, letting employees know how to help people who are lost, and requiring staff to report such cases to the police and share the information with other stations.
minsikyoon@heraldcorp.com
