Last summer, an 84-year-old man with dementia alarmed his neighbors at a senior living community in Simsbury, Conn., by announcing that he had a gun and planned to shoot a bear. The man later reported that his .38-caliber Colt revolver was missing; police found it, loaded, in the console of his car. Police got a court order to seize that gun and a rifle he had in his closet.
In December, police seized 26 guns from the Manchester, Conn., home of a 77-year-old man with dementia who was threatening to kill his wife. She told police that he was a danger to himself, and that his threats were “normal baseline behavior.”
In 2008, police in Manchester also seized nine firearms from a 70-year-old man with dementia who had pointed a gun at his daughter when she went to check on him because he didn’t recognize her at first. The man had been sleeping with loaded guns under his pillows and hiding guns in drawers, and his daughter was worried for the safety of his home health aides.
In Ohio, at one memory care clinic, 17 percent of patients diagnosed with dementia reported having a firearm in their homes, according to a 2015 Cleveland Clinic study.
But many families are reluctant to take away the sense of safety, independence and identity that their loved one, often the family patriarch, derives from guns.
‘A Guilt I’ll Never Ever Get Away From’
In the Appalachian mountains of West Virginia, Malissa Helmandollar, a 46-year-old assistant in an optometrist’s office, regrets not taking her father’s guns away.
Her dad, Larry Dillon, loved to hunt. Even after a coal-mining accident left him paralyzed from the waist down at age 21, Dillon would shoot turkey, squirrel and deer from the seat of his four-wheeler. For as long as she could remember, her father kept a gun under the cushion of his wheelchair.
“He felt he couldn’t take care of us, or himself, without it,” she said.
In June 2017, when her father was 65, she began to notice strange behavior.
“He would see people crawling out of the washing machine,” she said. He forgot how to tell time. Sometimes he would just stare at his dinner plate “like he didn’t know what to do.”
Every night for weeks, Dillon grew scared that people were trying to break in and burn his house down, Helmandollar said. Dillon slept with a 9 mm semiautomatic Glock pistol at his nightstand in the double-wide trailer he shared with his wife, Sandy, in Princeton, W.Va.
Helmandollar made him an appointment with a neurologist, but he never made it to the doctor.
Helmandollar sped to the house with her son. She found her stepmother, Sandy, dead in an armchair with several bullet wounds. Helmandollar heard her father tell police that he saw intruders breaking in to the house, so he grabbed his Glock and started shooting in the bedroom where his wife and granddaughter were watching TV.
But there had been no intruders that night. Dillon, who was deemed incompetent to stand trial for murder, was diagnosed with Lewy body dementia, a disease whose early symptoms can include vivid visual hallucinations.
Helmandollar said her father never understood what he had done. Before he died in April, he kept asking Helmandollar why his wife never visited him. She could never bring herself to tell him.
Meanwhile, Helmandollar’s daughter and 18-year-old son are in counseling for the trauma they experienced.
“It crossed my mind that maybe I should’ve taken the guns, and I didn’t,” Helmandollar said. “It’ll be a guilt that I’ll never ever get away from.”
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