NJ: Reentry of a house looking for a missing dementia patient was valid under community caretaking doctrine

Defendant called the police to tell them that his mother with dementia had wandered off again, as she had six months earlier. One of the officers who looked for her returned to the house to look there again because, three times in the past, he’d found a missing dementia patient hiding in the house. Looking in the basement, the officer found drugs. The search was valid under the community caretaking function. State v. Mordente, 2016 N.J. Super. LEXIS 35 (Mar. 2, 2016):

Here, the motion judge found there was an emergency; a woman suffering from dementia was missing. The motion judge also credited the testimony of Sheriff Officer Wilson that it was established protocol to search the home in every missing person’s case to ensure that the individual had not been overlooked by a distraught relative. Importantly, there was no evidence that any officer had an ulterior motive to search the home for illegal activity. The sole reason the officers were at the home was at defendant’s urgent request to help find his mother. Defendant had also given no indication that he did not want his home searched. To the contrary, defendant had previously invited an officer into the home and his actions reflected a paramount desire to find his mother as soon as possible. Thus, all the facts establish that the sanctity and privacy of this home was not being invaded; rather, the sole object of the search of the home was to find a missing person as part of law enforcement’s community-caretaking function.

Our dissenting colleague views the search of the home as a mechanical adherence to protocol rather than a response to exigent circumstances. The facts demonstrate a true emergency where time was of the essence. Defendant’s mother suffered from dementia, she had been missing overnight in the wintertime, and defendant himself was clearly extremely worried about her welfare. The possibility that the basement door had been locked by her after she entered the basement, and that she had then fallen down the steps was posited by the motion judge and accepted by counsel as a distinct possibility. The fact that Officer Wilson was following established protocol in searching the home top to bottom does not undercut the conclusion that he was responding to an emergency. Indeed, it is often the case that standard police protocols are designed specifically to respond to emergency situations. See id. at 315, 63 A.3d 175.