A 49-year-old man who walked away from his Long Beach residential care facility in June has been found safe more than two months later, some 14 to 18 miles north in Norwalk. Francisco Garcia was last seen leaving the facility on the 900 block of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard on June 10, according to the Long Beach Police Department, but authorities did not make a public appeal for help finding him until August 11 — a gap of more than nine weeks.
Garcia, described by police as disoriented and living with medical conditions, was located safe and unharmed on Wednesday, police said, as reported by MyNewsLA.com. No additional information was provided about where exactly in Norwalk he was found or how he ended up there. The outlet did not specify what led investigators to that location after such an extended absence.
Police flyers issued alongside the August appeal described Garcia as a Hispanic male standing 5 feet 11 inches tall and weighing approximately 245 pounds, with black hair and brown eyes. His clothing and intended destination were unknown at the time he vanished, according to a City of Long Beach press release. As Patch noted, the more-than-two-month delay between Garcia’s disappearance and the public alert stands out sharply against how quickly other recent Long Beach cases were resolved.
A Delay That Outlasted Other Cases
When Long Beach police finally issued their public request for help finding Garcia in mid-August, they simultaneously announced that two other at-risk adults reported missing earlier that month — 39-year-old Marcos Solano and 42-year-old Tiffany Jones — had both already been located safely within days of being reported missing, per the same Patch report. That contrast leaves open questions about why Garcia’s case took so much longer to reach the public, and how he survived disoriented for over ten weeks before turning up in Norwalk…