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A Bangor-based organization is using its high-tech talents out of state for the first time to assist in the search for an elderly woman in Mississippi who has been missing for more than three weeks.
The story of Virginia Ratliff, 82, of Brookhaven, Miss., has been spread all over the news, and her husband of 62 years is anxious for any word of his wife’s whereabouts.
The two are well-known in Lincoln County, Miss., and are reported to have done everything together and even dressed alike, according to media reports.
Gary Soucy, a volunteer with the Down East Emergency Medicine Institute of Bangor, traveled to the Magnolia State on Wednesday at the request of Mississippi State Police and local authorities.
Using a high-resolution Nikon camera, Soucy is able to fly over locations and take detailed pictures that are then sent by FedEx to analysts at Volunteer Imagery Analysts for Search and Rescue in Ohio. It’s difficult to send the images electronically because of the magnitude of the files.
“It’s a new high-tech way of finding people that are missing and lost,” Richard Bowie, DEEMI director, said Thursday. Even if the woman has died, her body would still appear in an image, he said.
Once VIASAR receives the images, they immediately begin to analyze them. “We can read the ‘Clorox’ on a bottle, so it’s not hard to find a body with this imagery,” Bowie said.
VIASAR is a nonprofit affiliate of DEEMI that’s dedicated to providing advanced imagery analysis services to search and rescue organizations across the country. The Ohio-based organization has a business office in Blue Hill, Maine, and was founded by Chris Rowley.
Rowley is the cousin of Harrison Damon, the 17-year-old Orland boy who was killed in a fall from the Penobscot Narrows Bridge last March. Rowley founded VIASAR in memory of Damon and the technology was used in the search for his cousin.
“It’s nice that this simple idea we’re using here in Maine, it’s made a difference,” Bowie said.
The technology has been successfully used in numerous searches in Maine, including for a 3-year-old girl who apparently drowned last April in the Aroostook River; for missing Bangor man Matt Lacrosse whose body was recovered from the Penobscot River earlier this month, and for a fisherman who was missing off Little Deer Isle.
In Mississippi, they’re hopeful that the technology will help them locate Ratliff, who is believed to have gone off the road into a ditch or swamp area, Bowie said.
“In those areas it’s ‘un-guardrailed’ and there’s lots of swampy areas,” Bowie said.
Ratliff’s husband, Charles Ratliff, suffered some sort of medical problem the night before his wife went missing, and had been transferred from one medical facility to another.
Virginia Ratliff, who suffers from dementia, hadn’t driven for at least a year but went home to gather some of her husband’s belongings and is believed to have been on her way to see him at the VA hospital in Jackson.
There’s evidence that Ratliff made it home and picked up some of her husband’s personal items, including his slippers and an L.L. Bean jacket.
“She’d put them in the car and gone, and no one’s seen her since,” Bowie said. “We think she just drove off the road.”
Ratliff had three-quarters of a tank of gas in the white 1999 Mercury Grand Marquis she was driving and could have traveled anywhere in a 275-mile radius from the couple’s home, Bowie said.
“You really want to help them end this,” Bowie said. “He’s sitting at home post-surgery waiting for his wife to come home and the door doesn’t open.”
In a phone interview Thursday afternoon, Soucy said he had completed part of the search, and that they were going to continue after a short break.
“We’re still doing our mission,” he said. “We’ve done a large stretch of area and we’ve met with the family and the other agencies down here and we’ve got some new information that we’re going to act on, but we’re going to continue with the original flight plan.”
Soucy said the plan was to map or photograph an area that totals about 100 miles, but they take pictures from two angles, so it’s a total of about 200 miles.
“Everyone down here is just so nice and awesome to work with,” Soucy said. “[They] make me feel like one of their own.”
Soucy was scheduled to complete his mission Thursday and would be back in Maine this afternoon.
Bowie expected there would be several thousand photos that need to be analyzed in the search for Ratliff, and volunteers here in Maine will assist VIASAR analysts.
How long it takes will depend on whether the analysts have to go through every photo before finding something helpful.
“When people reach out to us like this, we’re willing to help,” Bowie said. “We’re willing to cross borders to see if we can help families to put things to rest.”
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