Retired Yakima doctor still missing in Ukraine – Yakima Herald
The search effort for a retired physician from Yakima missing in Kyiv, Ukraine, is set to focus on a park in the city, searchers said Wednesday.
In a blog post, Dr. Jay Sloop’s son, Greg, said resources were being trained on Zamkova Gora, a heavily wooded urban park in the Ukrainian capital of 2.8 million people. He asked volunteers to assemble Thursday at 8 a.m. local time at the Seventh-day Adventist Church on Luk’yanovskaya Street.
“Ask anyone you know in Kyiv to come out and search for Jay,” he wrote on the blog http://www.sloop.net/wordpress.
His father, a retired obstetrician who delivered babies for more than 35 years in Yakima, was last seen Tuesday morning after he left for a walk.
The 77-year-old doctor was on a medical mission for the Seventh-day Adventist Church, for whom he works as health care director at the church’s regional headquarters in Spokane.
Jay Wintermeyer, a church spokesman in Spokane, said one of the doctor’s grandsons flew to Kyiv Wednesday and is helping direct the search effort.
He said searchers concluded the park would be the best place to mount a hoped-for grid search and that volunteers with mountaineering skills were needed. “This area is heavily wooded, and it has some very steep sections,” he explained.
Wintermeyer said the State Department in Kyiv has been notified of the doctor’s disappearance, as have local police.
“They’ve been involved in the process,” he said of Kyiv police. “They came and interviewed people where Dr. Sloop was staying. They looked through his room for possible clues.”
As for speculation as to what happened to the doctor, Wintermeyer said one possibility is a heart attack or stroke that may have incapacitated the doctor.
“Our hope is that he’s just stuck and can’t walk or something,” he said, adding, “It’s really hard to speculate. We don’t know what happened.”
• Chris Bristol can be reached at 509-577-7748 or cbristol@yakimaherald.com. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/ChrisJBristol.