The corpse of a 76-year-old man who went missing from an Austin, Texas, memory care facility was discovered in the city’s north on Wednesday, according to police.
After receiving a report of a corpse at Parmer Lane and MoPac Expressway at 10:44 a.m., police officers reportedly proceeded to the scene to investigate.
After Paull Patterson went missing on the morning of November 7th, a Silver Alert was issued for him. According to APD, he was last seen leaving a medical institution on Amherst Drive and Parmer Lane at roughly 4 o’clock in the afternoon on the day prior to his disappearance.
Silver Alert was cancelled around 3 p.m., hours after the corpse was discovered, but police are still waiting for a definitive identification to be made by the medical examiner.
Investigators said the corpse was discovered only feet from where they had previously looked for Patterson at the Colonial Gardens memory care facility where he had last been seen.
“Today…detectives were back in the vicinity of the facility searching for Mr. Patterson when a resident phoned 911 to report finding a corpse. In an effort to find Mr. Patterson, the citizen had been scouring the region for days, according to Jerry Bauzon, assistant chief of police in Austin.
According to Bauzon, this suggests that Patterson may have been on the move during the first searches.
It was reported that he left Colonial Gardens on Sunday, November 6, but it wasn’t until until later that the police were notified.
After following a member of staff out the door, he left on foot. According to Bauzon, it took seven hours after Mr. Patterson left the building before anybody called APD.
Time is of the essence, he said, while looking for a missing individual.
“Especially with folks on foot because the sooner we can get out there, the more resources, the police we have on patrol and patrol vehicles, we’ve got helicopter units, we’ve got canine searches,” he said. To paraphrase, “the sooner we’re out there, the less time the individual has to… make his way out from that location, the nearby vicinity.”
“I can’t explain the seven-hour holdup. The lack of information about his whereabouts is mostly attributable to the seven-hour lag. And I believe really affected the result of this case,” Amber Russell, founder of LOAR personal injury litigation practice, stated.
She said that the family is heartbroken and full of questions rather than answers.
The family and I am both curious as to what went wrong here. And most crucially, how to stop it from happening to other families,” Russell pleaded.
Russell has said that they, too, are curious about the matter.
What happened “was avoidable, it shouldn’t have happened,” she said.
She expressed appreciation to the community for their assistance throughout the search.
Russell added, “Once the news got out, folks who had never known the family came out and began looking out of the kindness of their own hearts.”
She said a neighbor discovered the corpse they suspect to be Paull.
She said that this community member helped locate Patterson out of the kindness of his heart.
