A shoe carried by a missing 72-year-old Filipino man with dementia was found Sunday, July 23 by members of a search party near a Lowe’s parking lot in Bellingham.
Edgar B. Aberilla went missing on July 4 after being dropped off at the Lowe’s on Sunset Drive by Burlington City Councilmember James Stavig. Stavig is a neighbor of Aberilla’s daughter, Abigail Tullius, who lives in Burlington. Aberilla and his wife were visiting from the Philippines.
The shoe that was found was not the one Aberilla was wearing. Aberilla left the house only carrying a small plastic bag filled with shoes, a crossbody bag and an Xbox game in hand.
Tullius was setting up a table and tent for the search Sunday when she noticed a canvas shoe lying in a patch of grass between two parking lots. After a close look, she knew it was one of the shoes her father carried with him the day he disappeared, so Tullius said she called Bellingham police.
A Bellingham officer and a Whatcom County search-and-rescue dog arrived to inspect the shoe, Tullius said. After letting the dog get a scent from it, Bellingham PD collected some hair found inside the shoe. A DNA mouth swab of Tullius was taken to see if it would match the hair. The search dog was unable to trace the scent of the shoe, she said.
Tullius had recently requested help through a Facebook group dedicated to finding Aberilla after two weeks of searching by friends and family yielded nothing.
The six-hour search drew close to 19 people, including two Burlington police detectives, and covered a two-and-a-half-mile radius from where Aberilla was last seen.
Burlington Detective Sgt. Jeremy Kramer, who oversees the detective division, said last week a missing elder is typically found within a few days, so Aberilla’s disappearance is highly unusual.
Tullius said Sunday’s efforts were a success because a clue was found, and the search now seems centralized so that Burlington and Bellingham officers can have direct communication.
“Now that everyone is here, they are actually talking to each other,” she said. Previously, she told Cascadia Daily News she was frustrated with the lack of collaboration between the two departments.
Law enforcement officers from two jurisdictions had canvassed several areas where Aberilla was last spotted and have reviewed surveillance videos.
Detective Jason McDonald, the Burlington Police officer working on Aberilla’s case, joined the search. In the 19 days since Aberilla’s disappearance, McDonald said he reviewed surveillance videos to determine any travel patterns and searched multiple locations.
“I was working on [looking at] video to determine any travel patterns,” McDonald said in a phone interview. “I was up [in Bellingham] on Friday [July 14] and looked all around up to Whatcom Falls Park and downtown but I was not getting any sightings.”
Aberilla disappeared after coming back to Burlington from a Fourth of July celebration in Anacortes. He left his daughter’s house, went outside onto the main road where he flagged down Tullius’ neighbor, Stavig, and asked for a ride. Not knowing about Aberilla’s dementia, Stavig dropped him off in Bellingham.
Tullius said she was taking a 30-minute nap when her father disappeared. She added she had been away from her family for some time and did not know the extent of her father’s dementia.
Joining the search was concerned resident Saed Abdou, who does not know Aberilla or his family but is familiar with the area Aberilla was last seen.
“Since my father-in-law had dementia and lived around the Sunset [Drive] area where Edgar [Aberilla] was last seen, I felt I had to help find this person,” Abdou said.
After searching for Aberilla in a homeless encampment near Sunset Pond, Abdou said his search team of three got lost and scratched up by thorns while trying to exit the encampment.
“Search and rescue should be doing this job, not citizens and people from the community,” Abdou added.
Janis Velasquez Farmer joined the search party because she felt connected to Aberilla through her Filipino heritage.
“In our [Filipino] community he would be considered an uncle, so when I talked to my family about [joining the search] I said let’s go look for uncle,” Farmer said.
Tullius hopes more footage of her father surfaces to get a better idea of his movements.
“From [Lowe’s] we don’t know where exactly my dad went or if he took another ride with some random person,” Tullius said. “If the police discover more footage of where my dad went after he was dropped off, then maybe we will know where to proceed.”
