Sheriff's policy "nearly cost my wife her life"

His injured wife under heavy sedation not far away, tears welled in Tom Rider's eyes as he talked at the hospital Friday about her weeklong ordeal and the sheriff's policy that he says nearly cost her life.

Tanya Rider, 33, was upside down, wearing a seat belt, in her crumpled sport-utility vehicle for more than a week while her husband of seven years begged the King County Sheriff's Office to search for her. But he said he repeatedly was told that the Maple Valley woman didn't meet the qualifications to be considered a missing person.

It wasn't until Thursday, after Tom Rider signed over access to his wife's phone records and volunteered to take a polygraph test in an effort to eliminate suspicions about his role in her disappearance, that deputies launched an intense search. Investigators found the missing woman's car that afternoon about 20 feet down a steep ravine overgrown with blackberry bushes and heavy brush.

Rider said he asked the sheriff's office last weekend to trace his wife's cellphone. Since his first interaction with the sheriff's office, he said, he was met with bureaucratic red tape from a 911 dispatcher who said Tanya Rider couldn't be categorized as a missing person because she wasn't a minor, elderly or mentally ill.

"The policy that tied their hands nearly cost my wife her life. That policy needs to be changed," Tom Rider said Friday. "All I know is no one else should go through what she went through."

King County Sheriff Sue Rahr said Friday that she is investigating what happened and having her staff pull all 911 call recordings connected with Tanya Rider's disappearance. But, Rahr said, her department is overwhelmed with missing-persons reports, most of which turn out to be nothing.

"I do take his concerns seriously," Rahr said. "I want to know if he tried to report this and we made a mistake. We're doing that now; it might take us a couple of days. If we made a mistake, we're going to address that."

Rider's kidneys were in peril from severe dehydration by the time rescue crews reached her Thursday afternoon. The muscles in her leg had "died" from an untreated injury she received during the crash. She also suffered a broken collarbone, dislocated shoulder and gash above her eye in the crash, said Dr. Lisa McIntyre, a general trauma surgeon at Harborview Medical Center.

On Friday, Rider's body was flushed with fluids in an attempt to purge toxins, McIntyre said. Though sedated, Rider has moved her arms and legs in response to commands.

"She at least does not have any significant internal injuries or brain injuries," McIntyre said. "She is not out of the woods."

McIntyre said it will be days, or weeks, before doctors know whether Rider's kidneys will rebound fully. Meanwhile, McIntyre said, several surgeries will be performed on Rider's leg muscles.

Tom Rider, 39, said he has been at his wife's bedside, squeezing her hand and telling her he loves her, but they haven't spoken. That might change today, if doctors take out her breathing tube and remove her from a ventilator.

She had just finished up an overnight shift at a Bellevue Fred Meyer store at 9 a.m. on Sept. 20 and stopped by Whole Foods Market for something to eat before the crash, her husband said.

Because they each work two jobs with varying hours, Tom Rider said he didn't notice his wife was missing until about 9:30 a.m. two days later, when another Fred Meyer employee called to find out where she was. Rider called Bellevue police, because she was last seen in that city, but the case was transferred to the sheriff's office because the couple live in Maple Valley.

But Rahr said her department receives up to 700 missing-persons cases each year and that the vast majority involve someone who just failed to come home on time or "an adult who wants to leave on their own accord."

"We get hundreds, hundreds and hundreds of missing-persons reports each year," Rahr said. "When you get a healthy adult woman who has access to a great deal of money and the ability to get away, that's not going to raise a red flag."

While 911 protocol is to not send deputies unless there is an indication of foul play, suicide or the person has a medical condition that will leave them vulnerable, dispatchers do have leeway if "something doesn't sound right," Rahr said.

When a missing-persons detective received the report Monday, the detective called Tom Rider, as well as his wife's bank and her employers. The detective said the bank reported activity in an account she believed only Tanya Rider had access to.

"That indicated to the investigator she was not dead," Rahr said.

But Tom Rider told the detective Wednesday that he had been using the account.

"Once we realized there was no activity on the bank card and no one heard from her, it changed the tone of the investigation," Rahr said.

Late Wednesday, sheriff's investigators went to Verizon for Tanya Rider's cellphone activity. After receiving that information Thursday, investigators used a technology they call "pinging" to trace the cellphone's location within eight miles of a phone tower on Highway 169 in Renton, Rahr said.

Verizon tracked the phone by ping triangulation — utilizing three cell towers to figure out where the device was. Cellphones emit pings constantly, and these signals identify which company has cell towers closest to the location of a particular cellphone.

Charnsin Tulyasathien, Sprint's group manager of consumer applications and GPS solutions, said satellites can pinpoint phones equipped with global-positioning-system chips. If that fails or the phone is an older model, companies also can use a "ping" — which was used to find Rider's phone.

Tom Rider said his wife had a new phone with built-in GPS. For GPS to be used, however, Tanya Rider would have had to use her phone. It isn't clear why she never used the phone.

Pinging technology is best known locally for helping find a San Francisco family whose vehicle was stuck in a snowy, remote area in Oregon last year. Rescuers traced a "ping" connection from a family cellphone to a cell tower and eventually found James Kim's wife and two daughters alive. Kim, 35, who had left the family in an attempt to find help, was found dead nearby.

Times staff reporter Christina Siderius contributed to this report.

Jennifer Sullivan: 206-464-8294 or jensullivan@seattletimes.com