KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A Kansas City grandmother says she continually has an unwelcome visitor. A woman shows up at her house, nearly 15 times over the past few months, looking for someone that doesn’t live there.
Lisa Bradbury said she keeps coming back looking for a man named Harold. She said she not only wants her to stop coming over to her apartment, but hopes she gets the help she needs.
“She comes here like she is coming to visit a friend. She’s carrying sometimes groceries or something in a bag. She looks like she stopped by a convenience store and got a beverage, and she’s holding onto the door waiting for me to open the screen for her like she’s actually going to go visit a friend,” Bradbury said.
Over the past few months she keeps coming. Sometimes at 7 a.m. other times at 9 p.m. She walks up to the door and knocks, bangs, and rings on her doorbell until she opens up.
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She doesn’t believe the woman is homeless and thinks she’s in her 70s. Bradbury said the woman always drives when she shows up. Sometimes she says the woman will hide her car at either end of the block and run up to knock on the door.
“I really feel sorry for her because I’m like, something has happened in her life that has brought her back here, and that she has something going on mentally, and there’s something she wants to see or a person she wants to talk to,” Bradbury said.
Bradbury said police haven’t done much to help. She says each of the times she’s called they don’t get her name, and shoo her off the property. They tell her not to come back, but she always does.
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The Kansas City, Missouri Police Department has a Crisis Intervention Team with at least one member on each shift. Sgt. Sean Hess who manages the team says around 40% of KCPD has crisis intervention training.
“Our biggest goal is to work with probably the at risk population. The most venerable in Kansas City in our community. Our goal is to get these people into services with mental health providers, and really out of the law enforcement jail type area,” Hess said.
He says there may be a chance his team already knows the woman and who he is, but didn’t have information on this exact case. FOX4 gave Bradbury the information to get in touch with him and the CIT so she can follow up when the woman comes back.
Hess did not say there was an issue with overcrowding that would cause them not to take her in for a mental health evaluation, but did say they may be able to assign the woman a case manager in the future.
“Even if they’re close to capacity we could bring her in there get her set up with a case manager, and that’s when the dominoes really start falling into place,” Hess said.
He says if you are dealing with someone in a mental health crisis you should be sure to tell dispatch if you call 911 that you would like a crisis intervention team member there to help intervene.
“They’re able to find out – do we know them? Do they have a history? Have they been engaged before? And family is a big key if we can find history from the family about what’s going on,” Hess said.
Lara Ashbaugh is a Mental Health First Aid expert for Truman Medical Centers University Health. She’s never met this woman and is not involved in the case, but says keeping calm is the best defense in situations like this.
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“Coming from a place of calm, you know, hey, and just letting them know what’s really going on sticking to the facts. Like, there is no Harold here, there, this is not the right place, and you need to go somewhere else,” Ashbaugh said.
Bradbury says she’s losing her patience, and hopes KCPD steps in and gets the woman the help she needs.
“I want her to get help, but I also want the situation to stop,” Bradbury said.
Both KCPD and Bradbury say they want to figure out who she is so they can get her help. They hope once they identify her and can get in touch with family she may stop coming back.
Bradbury said the woman seems to get more and more agitated each time she comes back and believes if it continues there could be a serious problem. She says she doesn’t want it to get to that point.
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