Legendary singer from The Platters found safe days after disappearing in Brooklyn
BROOKLYN (WABC) -- The family of a legendary singer is breathing a sigh of relief after she was found safe on Wednesday days after she went missing in Brooklyn.
NYPD officers say 80-year-old Sandra Hall, who sang with hit group The Platters, had been missing for four days.
Hall was a mega-star and known in the 1950s and '60s as Sandra Dawn. Although she wasn't the group's original female member, her work and the group's iconic songs topped Billboard charts and earned The Platters their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
She went missing last Friday afternoon after getting on an uptown No. 2 subway train at Atlantic Terminal Mall on Flatbush Avenue.
Her family said they received a call Wednesday that she was found at a hospital in Lower Manhattan.
It turns out Hall, who suffers from dementia and did not have any identification on her, was taken to NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital on Friday - the same day she went missing.
According to family, authorities initially checked hospitals for "Jane Doe" but did not find her until Wednesday.
Her daughter said the wait was agonizing.
"I can't tell you how much angst, how worried, I would sit out here and look up and down the street and wait for her to come back," Natasha Barrett said.
Hall's granddaughter is also her caregiver. She said they were in Downtown Brooklyn around 4 p.m. to catch a show at Brooklyn Music Academy when Hall wandered off.
"It was very hard, very hard, especially for me because I'm like if something happened to her, that would be my fault," Tairese Barrett said. "I had my 6-year-old with me and I didn't feel safe enough to run, like go run after her with my 6-year-old around train tracks."
Tairese said they have been separated before but her strong and willful grandma was never gone for such a long time.
"She's done this before, she hopped on a bus when I had two of my children with me, she knows not to do it when it's just me but when two of my children, she hopped the bus and she didn't come back until way later, but she came back," Tairese said.
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