Missing Person Found His Way Home Thanks to a Pokemon Go Player and Her Pokestop Routine

Pokemon are quite handy in the pixelated world. In real life, they can be classified as a fun distraction.

A Navy veteran Allison Hines, who has her daily routine of checking in at a Pokestop, noticed something new on her visit to Kenny Shields Park (Covington, Ky) on April 14. She found an old man, Homer Howard, 83, who has been missing from his home in Ohio since previous Thursday. Due to his dementia, he couldn’t find his way back home.

Allison didn’t know that this man had this vicious disease. She saw his Navy cap and smiled at him, but he did not smile back. She immediately noticed that something was wrong.

“As I turned the corner, everything in my being said, ‘Stop, turn this car around and go check on him.'”

She then asked if he was OK, to which he replied that he was getting old. He said that he was waiting for his wife to come and pick him up.

Hines asked him: Do you know you’re in Kentucky?'” As expected, he did not know that he was in Ohio. He traveled 30 miles from his home and his two daughters.

“Lots of thoughts went through my mind,” daughter Tammy Richardson said. “I just had to stop them. I just had to keep hoping, praying and waiting until we heard from him.” She said that there are no words to describe the relief she and her siblings felt when they heard their dad at the other end of the phone.

The Navy cap Howard wore that day wasn’t his, daughter Tonya Geringer said, but it and Hines’ devotion to her Pokemon Go routine precipitated an answer to her frantic prayers.

“I’m very grateful for Pokemon Go,” she said. “My goodness. What I loved about it is, when I played its it got me out in the community. It was a social game. Today, it saved a man’s life.”

Via WCPO.