A 68-year-old Rocklin man with Alzheimer’s disease who vanished on foot Friday morning, telling a store employee he planned to hitchhike roughly 80 miles to Danville, was found safe later that night. Michael Fitzgibbons had no working cell phone, no credit cards, and no vehicle when he disappeared, prompting the California Highway Patrol to issue a Silver Alert spanning five counties before canceling it once he was located.
Fitzgibbons was last seen near Tree Swallow Circle and Frog Hollow Place in Rocklin, according to a Silver Alert shared by the Rocklin Police Department, which retweeted the California Highway Patrol’s regional alert covering Placer, Sacramento, Yolo, Solano, and Contra Costa counties. The alert asked anyone with information to call 9-1-1. Fitzgibbons was found safe Friday night, and CHP subsequently canceled the alert, according to SFGATE.
A Trail That Led Toward the Bay Area
Before he disappeared, Fitzgibbons reportedly told an AT&T store employee on Crossings Drive in Rocklin, at around 11:30 a.m. Friday, that he intended to hitchhike to Danville without a phone, cash, or car, per a report attributed to LegacyUpdate. That detail helped explain why the search stretched across a wide swath of Northern California rather than staying confined to Rocklin, since a hitchhiker on foot could plausibly cross several county lines in a matter of hours.
The wide geographic net reflects how Silver Alerts function differently when a missing person has no vehicle to trace. Because Fitzgibbons wasn’t traveling by car, CHP relied on Be-On-the-Lookout broadcasts, electronic flyers, and social media posts through its @CHPAlerts account rather than the overhead freeway signs typically used to circulate a license plate and vehicle description, according to CalAlerts.org.
The Legal Threshold Behind a Silver Alert
California’s Silver Alert system is governed by Government Code section 8594.10, enacted in 2012 through Senate Bill 1047, which allows law enforcement to request a regional alert for missing individuals 65 or older, or those with cognitive impairments, once local resources have been exhausted and the person is believed to be in peril, per FindLaw. The law was later expanded in 2015 to cover cognitively impaired adults of any age. Every Silver Alert request in the state is evaluated around the clock by staff at the Emergency Notification and Tactical Alert Center, or ENTAC, housed at CHP headquarters in Sacramento, which serves as the clearinghouse for six separate state alert systems, according to the California Highway Patrol…