By Kaitlin Keane
New Haven Register
OXFORD, Conn. — Oxford’s newest volunteer emergency medical services team was called into action last Friday to help rescue a New Haven man who was missing for two days.
The new team combines drones, the K-9 Search and Rescue Team and medical operations.
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“This is a huge success for us,” said Seth Poston, chief of Oxford EMS. “Obviously, finding somebody is important, but finding somebody alive is really our goal, and this is just the cumulative result of hours and hours of personal team training and these volunteer members being invested in saving lives.”
Poston said the Oxford EMS Special Operations team received a call from the New Haven Police Department around 6:30 a.m. June 12 about a New Haven man with autism who took a walk the night of June 10 and had not returned home.
The team members were sent an alert and those who were available arrived at the Oxford EMS headquarters for equipment and a mission brief. They then arrived on the scene at Edgewood Park at 10 a.m. and met with the New Haven Police Department and its Special Victims Unit for a briefing, he said.
With the New Haven Police Department leading the search, Poston said Oxford EMS set up its boat in the park’s duck pond to search for the man.
“It was believed he liked to walk through the park and watch the ducks, so we focused our search on that area, and as soon as we had the plan, we put our teams out in the field,” he said.
The Oxford K-9 units found several areas of interest around “a really overgrown marshy area that had really tall cattails” but could not access the area, Poston said.
He said the Oxford EMS Special Operations team used technology to track the dogs’ movements and behavior and found a specific area in the park where the dogs changed their behavior. The team then flew drones over where the dogs’ behavior changed and identified “something that could potentially be a person.”
“It was an anomaly that didn’t look like it belonged there, and it was in these overgrown cattails,” he said. “We marked it as a point of interest, deployed a K-9 team to investigate and verify, and that’s where we located the individual.”
Poston said they found the man near the park’s duck pond, about 100 to 150 feet off the nearby walking path. He said the man was unresponsive when they found him, and their team had EMTs who, along with the New Haven police, provided him with immediate life-saving care before the American Medical Response of New Haven took over.
The man was transferred to Yale New Haven Hospital for treatment, Poston said.
“What we saw was this great combination of technology combined with K-9 and human assets on the ground to make sure we were adequately using the resources to focus our search in areas where we were able to find the person,” he said. “For our team, for our organization, for the family, this was just a huge win for everybody all around and it shows that it works.”
He said the team is very new with the drone part launching recently and the K-9 part starting earlier this year.
“This is the first joint operation that we’ve done outside of Oxford,” Poston said. “We’ve had a couple of searches within our municipal area, but this is our first one outside (our area).”
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