My Uncle Dick is only 5 years older then me, and growing up in the late 1950s and early 60s, he was more like an older brother. He had a hot rod and was like Fonzie to me. Sadly, Dick developed Paranoid Schizophrenia in the late 1970s and became aggressive at times and didn’t trust anyone.
Everything was a conspiracy to him. He was in hospitals a couple of times but would not take the medicine or stay long. Our aunt divorced him and he had to be forcibly removed from the home by the sheriff. He was staying near my dad at a room dad got for him in 1990. But he got evicted for working on cars in his room (there was talk of a welding fire!). He took his inheritance from grandma out of the joint bank account my dad had opened for him, loaded up his car and drove off. No one ever saw him again. Until Friday. My dad spent a lot of his later years looking for his little brother. Most of us figured he ended up as a John Doe somewhere.
Dick’s two brothers have now both passed away, first my other uncle in 2013 and my dad in 2015. We even put a notice in dad’s obituary that his brother is “Whereabouts unknown”. The funeral eventually got all of us cousins back together through Facebook and email. All along I thought Dick’s four girls might know something, but the first thing the youngest asked when we got in touch was, “Do you know where my dad is?”
I had recently searched a bunch of area county’s court records to see if anything showed up, but found nothing. So I wrote up all the information I had and took it and a photo to the county sheriff to see if I could get them interested. As expected, they considered it a case of an adult who simply does not want to be contacted. His name is very common, but a search for combined name and birthday showed he did not have a current driver’s license, and the last activity on the expired license was a ticket from 1992 in a county across the state. That was more then I had before.
When I got home I immediately searched the court records for that county. There are 4 courts listed. The first two were city courts and had nothing. The third was the county civil/criminal court and had some more citations from the 1990s and early 2000s but no address and he was a no-show for the court dates. In fact when I opened his case files I triggered an outstanding warrant alert. Getting closer!
Finally the county Probate Court had a lengthy case file on someone with his name and birth date. He had been found homeless, living under a bridge and had frostbite on one foot. The court immediately declared him a ward of the state and he has been in an assisted living and rehab center for 3 years. Their notices searching for family turned up nothing, and Dick never told them anything.
Yesterday my sister and I drove to the nursing home to check it out. It is indeed our missing Uncle Dick, now 76 years old. I would never have recognized him with the large grey beard. It took awhile before he even believed we were who we claimed to be, and awhile before we were sure. But eventually he remembered his four daughters and all us cousins. I got him talking about cars, we had both raced Fords and that greatly pleased him. We had noticed in the case files that he had a $10 monthly allowance for Pepsi so we took a 12 pack and he was delighted.
The sad note to all this is that as I was going through my dad’s papers my sister had, and we realized dad had been using the wrong birthday for his searches, he was off by a year. He might at least been able to find out Dick was in that area long before before he passed away.
The staff said his paranoia shows, but he has been calm with no sign of aggression. We are treading lightly. I asked him if it was OK if we came back, and he was unsure. We won’t push him, but there are a dozen people who are all glad Dick has been found alive.
Dennis