Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 25, 1992 TAG: 9203250055
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: POST FALLS, IDAHO LENGTH: Medium
John Kingery, 84, was left behind at the Coeur d'Alene Greyhound Park on Saturday night with a bag of diapers and a note identifying him as an Alzheimer's patient. His plight elicited hundreds of calls from people as far away as Europe offering care, advice and clothing.
"There's not many families that haven't been touched by Alzheimer's," said Mike Regan, spokesman at the hospital where Kingery was being looked after. "People understand. They're coming out of the woodwork."
Police Chief Cliff Hayes said officials of two Portland, Ore., nursing homes where the man had stayed in recent weeks called to identify him after seeing his picture on a television news show Monday.
Detectives contacted the man's daughter, Sue Gifford of Portland, "but she's not telling us a lot," Hayes said. Gifford checked her father out of a nursing home 365 miles away from Post Falls on Saturday morning, he said.
The Kootenai County prosecutor is reviewing the case, but there is apparently no Idaho law covering abandonment of an adult, Hayes said.
Kingery was staying at the Kootenai Medical Center in Coeur d'Alene, 10 miles east of Post Falls in Idaho's panhandle.
Detectives were trying to find out how the man got from Oregon to Idaho, and who removed labels from his clothes and wrote a partially inaccurate note that was taped to his wheelchair, Hayes said.
Gifford, his daughter, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that "I put him in with Regency Care Center. I don't understand what's going on here."
Asked whether she knew how her father got to Idaho, Gifford said, "Not for sure," but added that she "maybe" had a good idea how it occurred. She declined to elaborate.
Kingery was moved three weeks ago from the Laurelhurst Care Center to Regency Park Living Center, both in Portland, the police chief and Laurelhurst administrator Hal Elliott said. Doctors had advised against the transfer to another center because it had a lower level of care, Elliott said.
"Everybody's kind of freaked out," Elliott said. "We saw John's picture and knew who that was. We're very upset."
A Regency administrator, John Browning, declined to comment.
by CNB