Metro officials have suspended two employees indefinitely after a 90-year-old woman and two others disappeared for more than five hours after leaving an adult care center.
The MetroAccess program — which provides transportation services for the disabled — sent a vehicle to pick up Gertrude Garner of Clinton at the Helping Hands Adult Services Center in Prince George’s County on Tuesday.
The vehicle left with Garner and two other disabled passengers around 4:10 p.m. but failed to drop them off at their homes.
A MetroAccess supervisor eventually dropped Garner off at her grandson’s home around 9:45 p.m.
Nobody at MetroAccess or the county police department would discuss what happened during those 5 1/2 hours.
“She was upset,” said Garner’s grandson, Perry Robinson, explaining that his grandmother has dementia and couldn’t articulate where she had been. “She was walking slow, was shaking. She just didn’t look the same.”
Robinson did not seek medical attention for his grandmother and said she seemed fine the following morning. The condition and names of the other two passengers have not been disclosed.
Robinson, 49, said he returned home around 8 p.m. to find Garner missing. He called the adult care center — and eventually the police — looking for answers.
Around 9:15 p.m., police called Robinson to report they had found his grandmother — sitting in the MetroAccess vehicle — at a gas station less than a mile from the adult services center.
“There was a communications breakdown between the dispatcher and two drivers,” Metro spokesman Steven Taubenkibel said.
He declined to explain why a second driver had been suspended or why the dispatcher was not reprimanded.
“We’re following up with both drivers that were involved,” he said, adding that an investigation in conjunction with MV Transportation — a private company that manages the MetroAccess service — was in its early stages.
Calls to MV Transportation, Prince George’s County police and the Metro employees union were not returned.
Robinson said he received a call from MetroAccess on Wednesday afternoon but learned only that an investigation was being conducted. He called Channel 9 News, which broke the story Thursday.
Sharon Moore of the Equal Rights Center — an advocacy group tasked with monitoring complaints about the MetroAccess program — said similar incidents have been reported.
“I’m very familiar with this kind of complaint — where people are left on the vehicle for extended periods of time,” Moore said. “It’s unacceptable.”
