"We constantly have our eye on the door and on Michael, and it's a hard way to live," said Melanie Browne of Katy, Texas. "I think that's the hardest part of raising him, is just the wandering issue."
Autism groups are calling for greater awareness and study of what they call "wandering" or "elopement" behavior, referring to this habit of fleeing a place at any moment. Neither of those words accurately describes the phenomenon, but there's no better shorthand at the moment, says Dr. Paul Law, director of the Kennedy Krieger Institute's Interactive Autism Network.
Wandering is probably the leading cause of death among children with autism, Law said. Only limited data are available, but drowning seems most common among these fatalities.
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