The family of a Los Angeles man who suffers from dementia is accused of flying him to Britain and abandoning him.
Roger Curry’s wife Mary and son Kevin took the 76-year-old to England, where he was found in the western city of Hereford at a bus stop, in November 2015, according to court documents.
His condition prevented him from explaining his identity or how found himself in Hereford other than once uttering “Roger Curry” to caretakers at a nursing home where he was taken, the BBC reported.
A BBC reporter followed a clue, a high school yearbook photo from the 1950s posted by someone who thought it looked like the elderly man, to a school north of Seattle.
The network then traced down the man’s identity to a home in Southern California, where neighbors remembered the married father-of-two as a “kind family man” but noted that his house is now a burnt out shell.
Jerry Maiques told the BBC that a few months before Curry disappeared in 2015, he saw him and his wife Mary living on an inflatable mattress in the destroyed building’s backyard.
They were allegedly being fed by their son Kevin Curry, who had years earlier been the subject of a restraining order by his father.
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Kevin Curry told the BBC that he was not involved in abandoning his father, but that they and his mother went to England on vacation and the dementia-sufferer had to be hospitalized during it.
The Guardian reported that court documents filed by the Los Angeles public guardian's office say "In late 2015 Mr Curry was taken surreptitiously to England by his wife Mary Curry and his son Kevin Curry and abandoned there."
A request for comment to the Los Angeles County Office of the Public Guardian was not immediately returned.
Britain’s Evesham Journal reports that a man from another area of western England was arrested for allegedly kidnapping Roger Curry, but is on bail.