A 72-year-old woman from Hot Springs, Arkansas has not been in contact with her family since June, despite having been spotted more than 500 miles away in Stone Mountain, Georgia, just weeks earlier. Sherry A. Wages left her Arkansas home around March 18 and was seen in person at the Stone Mountain post office on May 27, before texting her family for the last known time on June 9.
According to FOX 5 Atlanta, the Stone Mountain Police Department received the case on August 10, more than two months after Wages' last contact with relatives. Police said Wages has mental health challenges, and her family has said she normally stays in regular contact with them, making the prolonged silence especially alarming. Arkansas authorities have said Wages may be in the Atlanta area, and Stone Mountain Police are now working to determine where she went after she was last seen at the post office.
The gap between Wages' disappearance and formal police involvement in Georgia stretched across months and state lines. Days before Stone Mountain Police opened their case, the Morgan Nick Foundation, an Arkansas nonprofit that assists law enforcement and families with missing person searches, issued a public alert for Wages on August 4, directing tips to the Garland County Sheriff's Office, according to a Morgan Nick Foundation Facebook post. That alert came before the case had reached Stone Mountain Police, underscoring how a case can move through advocacy channels before local departments hundreds of miles away formally take it up.
Description and How Wages May Be Traveling
Police describe Wages as 5 feet 6 inches tall, weighing about 150 pounds, with gray hair and hazel eyes. Officers said she may be traveling with a shepherd mix dog and could be in a small red Nissan, and that she traveled to Georgia according to Stone Mountain Police. Anyone with information is asked to contact the Stone Mountain Police Department at 770-879-4980.
The distance involved in Wages' trip is considerable. Driving from Hot Springs to Stone Mountain covers roughly 580 miles and takes nearly nine hours across multiple state lines, per Wanderlog, with Hot Springs situated in central Arkansas and Stone Mountain lying just east of Atlanta. Why Wages made that journey, what she was doing at the post office, and why so much time passed before her case reached Georgia police all remain open questions in the investigation.
How Missing Adult Alerts Work Across State Lines
Georgia has a dedicated emergency alert system for missing adults with cognitive or mental health conditions, known as Mattie's Call, created by the state's General Assembly in 2006, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. The alert can only be activated by local law enforcement agencies, and it requires investigators to first verify that a missing cognitively impaired adult faces immediate danger of serious bodily harm or death while ruling out other explanations, with cases also entered into the national NCIC missing persons database. The system takes its name from Mattie Moore, a 67-year-old Alzheimer's patient who wandered from her Atlanta home in 2004 and was found dead eight months later nearby, according to the Atlanta City Council, which noted more than 1,500 Mattie's Calls have been issued statewide in the alert system's first 15 years.
Arkansas, meanwhile, requires its police agencies to enter missing person reports into state and national databases immediately, without any waiting period, per the Arkansas Department of Public Safety. The state also runs Never Forgotten, a public searchable database launched in 2016 by the Arkansas Crime Information Center in partnership with the Morgan Nick Foundation and state police, according to the Arkansas Attorney General's office. Nationally, missing adult cases like Wages' are common: in 2025, 192,699 of the 498,038 total missing person records entered into the FBI's National Crime Information Center involved adults aged 18 and older, according to the Texas Center for the Missing.
Jurisdiction and Where to Send Tips
The case now sits with the municipal Stone Mountain Police Department, which operates out of City Hall at 875 Main Street and serves the city of Stone Mountain separately from the adjacent Stone Mountain Park Public Safety department, according to the City of Stone Mountain. Stone Mountain is a DeKalb County municipality located near the state park of the same name. Garland County, Arkansas, where Wages was first reported missing and where the sheriff's office continues to be involved, covers 721 square miles and serves a population of nearly 98,000 residents, according to the Arkansas Sheriff's Association. Stone Mountain Police have asked the public for help finding Wages and are continuing to investigate her movements after she was last seen in person.
