Mikey escapes

At home, there is our daughter-in-law and our two identical twin autistic grandsons, David and Michael (sometimes, "Mikey"; David is usually, "David). There are deadbolts on all the doors and locks on all the windows. It's probably not the best from a fire-safety perspective, but it beats the heck out of the safety perspective of not letting Mikey get out on his own.
The boys are 11. David is (now) high-functioning; Mikey is not. Mikey is intelligent. At his school, they had to create special curriculum for his highly autistic behavior but just-about-grade-level work. Mikey does have language - he talks like a 3 year old: always present tense; one to three word utterances with an occasional short sentence thrown in. He can speak longer sentences if he is repeating something that interests him - like the dialog from a show or the words from a favorite book. He has reasonable receptive language, as long as you discount that he has no concept of time or tense.
Saturday is "our" day with the boys. Mom drops them off around 11 am - Noon, and we take them home in their PJs. This Saturday was no exception.
Our house doesn't have as many locks as their house, and there are two of us. We have cast-contcrete (decorative - looks like stone) 6' fences around the yard and locking (deadbolt) cast-iron gates. We recently added a lock to the front door since the lock only locks from outside; inside it doesn't need the key.
Saturday evening, after dinner, David on the computer upstairs with Grandpa, Mikey running around the back yard, and grandma sitting overlooking the back yard.
All of a sudden ... too much quiet. Look around the yard - no Mikey.
Call upstairs, "Is Mikey up there with you?" No Mikey. We double-checked. We looked over the fences into the neighbor's yards - no Mikey. One neighbor had the side door to her garage open - no Mikey.
Split up - get in cars. Go around neighborhood; look at parks we visit.
Mikey is very autistic - he has no sense of things outside who he is and what he wants. He doesn't, "Stop, Look and Listen" - for cars or anything else. He is 5' tall, slender and fast as a whip. We call him "the stealth kid."
Where is he? OMG, there is a house under construction and all I can see is the frame - is he there? Driving slowly past the park - probably caused the other folks there to wonder what the heck I was doing - nope, not there either. Could someone have? no, can't think that - "God, please..."
Grandpa (Marc) was back at the house and called me to see if I'd had any luck - no. "Call the police. I'm coming back to the house."
Marc called me before I got back - and said, “They have him – well, they know where he is.”
The local police have joint communications with the next community and the road behind my house is the border between the two. Across the street is the edge of a joint forces training base. They rent out a lot of the space to companies that grow strawberries. Our grandson was with the soldiers who found him on the base ...
He crossed a ususally busy, 4 lane road with a divider to get to the "other" side. He went about 4/10 mile up the street and then went back a road. At some point - obviously we don't know exactly where - he must have squeezed through a gate to get in - because the cyclone fences around the base have barbed wire. He was barefoot.
The soldiers found him on some farm equipment where the road ends. They - fortunately - recognized the autism - remember, Mikey doesn't really talk unless you have some clue how to talk to him - and took him to the guard shack at the entrance to the base. They must have contacted the local police.
More on David in another post; however, he did provide one small spot of comic relief: On the way to pick up Mikey, David said, “I wonder what they’re doing with Mikey??”
Marc and I both cracked up – Mikey is on drugs so strong for the hyperactivity that, when David – who is fairly active himself – accidentally took ONE of his pills, he was groggy for two days. It takes two of us to take him anywhere "special" just to keep up with him. Yea, I wonder what THEY did with Mikey.
When we picked him up, and got him back into the car, he said, “Farm!” Earlier in the day he had come to me and said, "Plant beans." We seldom know where Mikey gets his ideas from, although we do sometimes figure it out after-the-fact. We did plant beans last year, but he lost interest in them right away. He had asked me right before dinner, and we were busy fixing food - so I had tried to tell him, "Next week." Not that he understands time, but he's been a little better about, "not immediately but later."
From our back yard, we can see the "farm" at the base. We *think* - because there is no way of knowing - that he used a Step 2 slide we have in the back yard to get over the top of the fence, and then just dropped - bare foot, mind you - to the sidewalk to start this journey.
After questioning, we took Mikey back into the car. As we got on our way, he said, "Farm!"
We said, “Home.”
He said, “FARM!!”
We finally got him to say, “Farm is closed.” That's his way of acknowledging, sort of, that he's not getting something Right Now.
ANYHOW – got them back to our house and completed our ‘regular’ bath routine, then took them home and told Mom. On the way back, I said, “I don’t care what the house looks like; I’m going to bed.” But this was not to be. I thought it was the toilet running. It was not. Suffice it to say that the plumber looked at things today and we are turning the water off except to shower. The plumber will be back Wednesday.