Larissa: woman, 72, missing 17 days, found dead

A 72-year-old woman, a resident of Larissa who had been missing since 3 August, that is for seventeen days, was found dead on the morning of Thursday 20 August. Her body was found at around nine in the morning in a ditch with dense vegetation and reeds, a short distance from her home. As newsit.gr reported, citing the local site onlarissa.gr, it was her relatives and not the authorities who found the body; the authorities were notified immediately and rushed to the scene. The exact circumstances of the death have not been established and are being investigated.

The 72-year-old suffered from dementia. According to the information gathered during the search, on the day she went missing she was returning home on the number 11 city bus and got off at the “Agia Sofia” stop on Karamanlis Avenue, one stop earlier than the one she usually used. From that point on, all trace of her was lost. Such a departure from a familiar route is characteristic in cases involving people with dementia, who can become disoriented even on routes they have taken daily for years.

A Silver Alert had been issued in the case, the notification mechanism activated for disappearances of elderly and vulnerable adults, and searches continued daily until the body was found. The fact that the woman was found in the end a short distance from her home, inside a ditch covered by vegetation, shows how difficult visual searching is in urban and peri-urban spots where summer vegetation is dense. Similar ditches and irrigation channels run across the Thessalian plain and the edges of the city, often without fencing or signage, and are not easily spotted from a few metres away.

The case adds to a series of incidents that have brought to the fore the question of care and supervision for elderly people who live alone or with limited support. In the same city, in an entirely separate case, the discovery of a woman’s body in a basement flat became known on Wednesday 19 August. The Silver Alert, which has operated in Greece since 2018 on the model of the Amber Alert for children, relies on the mass diffusion of information through television, radio and mobile phones, yet its effectiveness depends on whether the elderly person is in a spot visible to passers-by. The data on health in Greece show that spending on long-term care remains among the lowest in the European Union, with the burden falling almost entirely on the family. The authorities will complete their investigation into the circumstances of the 72-year-old’s death before the case file is closed. The causes have not been announced and no timetable for the findings has been made public.