RUMFORD - Thanks to an anonymous donor, police in Franklin and Oxford counties will soon get a high-tech tool that will help find missing or abducted children and adults afflicted with Alzheimer's or dementia.

Someone donated 12 iris-scanning devices to the Penobscot County Sheriff's Department in Bangor, the first law enforcement agency to buy the tool last year through a $25,000 grant from the Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation, according to Oxford County Sheriff Wayne Gallant.

Gallant, in turn, then wrote a grant to obtain one of the donated $12,000 devices through a collaborative effort with the Franklin County Sheriff's Office, Maine State Police, and police departments in Franklin and Oxford counties.

"We are pretty pleased that we're getting awarded it and the fact that police agencies across the state are all buying into it; that speaks highly of it," Gallant said by phone Friday afternoon in Paris.

He said the device takes pictures of children's and adults' irises - the colored part of the eye unique to a person which doesn't change with age - and stores them in a national database. Unlike searching a database of fingerprints, which can take hours or days, iris-scan searches take seconds.

"For instance, if we use this during a child identification clinic and, God forbid, there is a child abduction later, and the child is found, within seconds we'll get an identification. With fingerprinting, a fingerprint has 40 something identifiable characters, but the iris has more than a couple hundred. So, it's a good means of identification and a great tool to have for missing persons and people we find who are unable to tell us who they are," Gallant said.

On May 21, he will send two deputies to the Penobscot County Sheriff's Department to pick up the tool and get trained in its use. The deputies will be accompanied by two Franklin County deputies, a trooper, and one officer each from the Farmington and Rumford police departments, who will also be trained.

Like Gallant, Rumford police Chief Stacy Carter said Tuesday that his department is looking forward to using the device in conjunction with fingerprinting at the child identification clinics his officers conduct.

"Penobscot County Sheriff Glenn Ross gave us a demonstration of it at this winter's Maine Chiefs of Police conference, and it was pretty impressive. Technology like this that's available today for law enforcement is pretty exciting," Gallant said.

The other 11 donated iris-scanning tools will be dispersed to law enforcement agencies across Maine, he added.