A 79-year-old Salt Lake City woman with dementia has been found safe, police confirmed Thursday, a day after she vanished from the city's Fairpark neighborhood and triggered a statewide Silver Alert. LaVonna Partridge was last seen near 450 N. Chicago St. at approximately 3 p.m. on Wednesday, prompting an urgent search that ended with her safe recovery the following morning.
The Salt Lake City Police Department issued the Silver Alert Wednesday night, describing Partridge as having dementia and asking anyone with information to call 911. By Thursday, according to ABC4 Utah, police confirmed Partridge had been located safely. The department did not release additional details about where or how she was found.
Her last known location sits in Salt Lake City's Fairpark neighborhood on the city's Westside, a stretch of mid-century residential homes near 900 West and the Utah State Fairpark grounds, according to real estate records reviewed by Realtor.com. The area is close to major urban transit routes, a detail that matters in cases involving wandering, since dementia patients can cover significant ground quickly once disoriented.
How Utah's Silver Alert System Works
Utah's Silver Alert Notification System was created under Utah Code § 53-10-701 in 2019 through HB 215, giving law enforcement a coordinated way to broadcast alerts for missing endangered adults, according to the Utah State Legislature. The law defines an endangered adult as someone 60 or older, or a person under 60 with documented dementia. That statutory threshold is why Partridge's case, at 79 with a diagnosed condition, qualified immediately for activation.
Under Utah Code § 53-10-703, Silver Alerts rely on the Department of Transportation highway digital signage, but activations are restricted to the local geographic area where the person was last seen, per the Salt Lake City Police Department's policy manual. That localized approach is meant to avoid alert fatigue among drivers while still targeting motorists near the last known sighting. Internally, the department's Policy Manual Section 318.8 requires officers responding to missing endangered adult calls to transmit descriptive data through the Utah Criminal Justice Information System to the Bureau of Criminal Identification before a Silver Alert can be initiated, with verification of age or medical diagnosis required first.
Why Speed Matters in Dementia Cases
The urgency behind these alerts is rooted in well-documented risk. According to data from the Alzheimer's Association, 60 percent of adults living with dementia or Alzheimer's disease will wander away from home or care settings at least once, often triggered by stress, confusion, memory loss, or an attempt to fulfill a past routine. Research cited by the Fisher Center for Alzheimer's Research Foundation indicates that individuals who wander and are not located within 24 hours face a significant risk of serious injury or fatality from weather exposure or accidents, underscoring why officers treat these calls as time-sensitive emergencies from the outset.
The Utah Department of Public Safety's Bureau of Criminal Identification manages administrative oversight for these alerts statewide and can enter missing-person profiles into the FBI's National Crime Information Center database, ensuring agencies nationwide can identify a person if they turn up outside Utah. Not every vulnerable missing adult qualifies for this level of response, however. As Hoodline has reported, younger missing adults facing medical or mental health crises fall outside the Silver Alert law's age and diagnostic requirements and instead rely on Endangered Missing Advisories issued through the Department of Public Safety.
A Pattern of Safe Recoveries in Salt Lake City
Partridge's case follows a string of similar incidents handled by Salt Lake City police in recent years. In 2025, the department issued Silver Alerts for a 74-year-old man near 100 South and a 63-year-old woman, both of whom were found safe. Those earlier cases, along with Partridge's, illustrate how quickly community reporting paired with the alert system's highway signage and dispatch network can lead to safe resolutions when time is short.
-4.webp?w=160&h=400&fit=crop&crop=edges)