Missing Alzheimer’s Patient Found Dead After 8-Year Search, Family Left in the Dark

Hisham Terrak, 45, learned on Tuesday, September 26, through the judicial police, that his father El Mekki Terrak, whom he has been searching for since his disappearance on July 17, 2015, is already dead and buried. "The irony of this whole story is that he had been dead for eight years," laments this son who was 37 when his father, aged 79 and suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, had left his home without giving any news.

The family had alerted the Champigny police station of his disappearance and posted search notices on social media and in the media. To no avail. The retiree would have died a few days or even weeks after his disappearance, in a town in Seine-Saint-Denis. For the moment, the circumstances of his death are not known, reports Le Parisien. El Mekki’s body "was discovered between a railway track and an industrial area. Apparently by demonstrators as part of a strike by a company," explains Hisham.

El Mekki’s DNA was taken before he was buried anonymously in the indigent section of the cemetery in the area where he was found. "From what I know, this is a procedure that is authorized at the mayor’s discretion" to identify people found on public roads, details Hisham, recalling that the police had asked him three years ago for personal items of his father to carry out DNA tests. "I had given him a beret and his hearing aid."

Hisham hopes to recover his father’s remains to "bury him with dignity." "We are waiting for the administration to do its job to see if we can exhume him and have him buried in the Parisian cemetery of Thiais next to our mother where there is a vault," he says. And he adds: "Now there is a mourning to be done... I don’t know if I should be happy and relieved or if I should be sad and cry."