A MUCH READ/WATCH; Very Strong Language, Please! Family ‘Dumped Man With Dementia In UK Car Park Then Flew Back To America Without Him

An elderly man’s wife and son stand accused of taking him to Britain and abandoning him in a car park, before flying home to America. Roger Curry, who has dementia, was abandoned at a bus station two years ago with no ID, wearing only brand new clothes from Tesco, American court documents allege. He was found at Hereford bus station on November 2015in company of two men who flagged down a passing ambulance.

As paramedics assessed him, one of the men – described as having an American accent, but younger than Mr Curry – vanished from the scene, leaving the elderly man to be cared for at a nursing home while police and social services tried to ascertain his identity.

The clue to his identity came following a police appeal on BBC Midlands in March last year.  After watching the news report, viewer Debbie Cocker searched the internet and found an old picture that looked like a younger version of the unidentified man. 

The photo came from a 1958 yearbook for Edmonds High School in Washington State and it showed an 18-year-old student called Roger Curry.  Investigators then tracked down the Roger Curry pictured in the yearbook to a burnt-out house in an affluent suburb of Los Angeles.
His son Kevin and wife Mary
After being shown photographs, neighbours identified the mystery man as Mr Curry – a former nurse who is married with two children. They then told how his family had been hit by tragedy. In November 2014 the family's house burnt down in the middle of the night.

Neighbours did not see them again until August 2015, when they found Mr Curry and his wife – who is also ill – camping out in the yard of their burnt-out house. Their son Kevin had been bringing them food and they appeared to have been locked in behind the fence around the house. Neighbour Zenia Leon told Panorama that emergency services were shocked by what they found. 

She claimed they overheard the couple discussing what had happened, and said of Mr and Mrs Curry: 'They were talking together and they said they were here the night the house burnt down.' Miss Leon said Mr Curry was upset about his circumstances, adding: 'He was in tears. This is a big, burly macho man in tears saying, 'Who does this to their parents?'.'


Kevin Curry told Panorama, which is being screened at 8.30pm tonight, that he had nothing to do with the abandonment of his father in England. He said his father became ill when they were visiting England on holiday and that he asked a friend to take him to hospital. 

But he could not explain why he had left Mr Curry in England for eight months without telling anyone who he was.  Because of the high cost of care in America, elderly people are sometimes abandoned at hospitals in a practice called granny-dumping. A man in his fifties from Taunton, Somerset, was arrested last April on suspicion of kidnapping Mr Curry. He is on police bail and has not been charged, dailymail.co.uk reports.
                       

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