FARMINGTON – Three Franklin Savings Bank employees received commemorative coins Thursday from the Farmington Police Department for helping a confused elderly woman who wandered into the bank last Friday.

Police Chief Richard Caton III presented Roberta Meisner, Heather Perry and Lindsay Gray the department’s first Challenge Coins, small, heavy coins with Farmington Police and the Maine State Seal imprinted on one side and the law enforcement oath of honor written on the other. The women were commended for their compassion and quick thinking when the woman, who has wandered from her home in the past, came into the downtown bank alone and disoriented.

Meisner said the woman had a piece of mail and didn’t appear to be there for business or with anyone doing business. Meisner said she recognized the name on the mail as that of a woman who was reported missing by her family last week and setting off a police search.

Enlisting help from Perry and Gray, they looked around the bank area for her husband’s vehicle and then tried calling her home, but the phone did not work. They then called police.

The woman was talking about walking to Farmington Falls to see family members and appeared ready to leave, so employees convinced her to stay for coffee and talked with her until an officer arrived, Meisner said. Detective Mark Bowering took the woman home and alerted family members to the phone problem.

“The compassion shown and the actions taken by you and your co-workers not only saved this individual’s family undue worry, it saved the time and resources of a missing person search and may well have averted a tragedy in the community,” Caton read from a letter given to each employee.

The gold and silver Challenge Coins were donated to the department to give to people who take to “something special,” Caton said.

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