From what I've been told, there are a ton of incidents of just 50-70 year olds that are out for a daily walk and a couple things go wrong. The service in the hills around here is pretty poor, so it's not hard for me to imagine that this was a regular walk, you take a pint of water and a sweater and that's it.

I own a PLB that I use for safety when spearfishing from a kayak in Northern CA, but I don't bother throwing it in my pocket if I'm just walking the dog in the woods for a couple minutes. I can see this being a big help.

Going onto real backcountry trails unprepared is also very common, unfortunately. I see it all the time on trails in the Cascades where there's no cellphone coverage whatsoever (mountain valleys) and it's 10+ miles from the trailhead to any human residence. People still come wearing nothing but t-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops (!!!). Sometimes not even a bottle of water, too.

And, pretty much every year, there's at least one hiker who goes missing for days. If they're young and lucky, they manage to subsist, and SAR finds them eventually. If not... well, sometimes another hiker finds the body years later, but there's no shortage of names on the missing person list, either.