Countywide : Man Missing for 2 Months Turns Up

A disabled man missing for almost two months was found over the weekend after he phoned his mother to say hello, his family said Tuesday.

William Robert Kent Cousert, 28, of Orange, who suffers from a mild form of cerebral palsy and is described as having limited social skills, had been living and working in San Jose.

“I shrieked,” said Barbara Morris, Cousert’s mother, of the Saturday afternoon phone call from her son. “I said, ‘I hope you know I reported you as missing to the police.’ He kept saying, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ and I said, ‘You just don’t disappear from someone’s life for two months and expect them to do nothing.’

“I had him dead in my head.”

Cousert was unaware that his family and other relatives had been combing homeless shelters in Orange County.

“He didn’t even know his picture had been in the papers,” said Cousert’s aunt, Marilyn Wiersema. “He just didn’t have a clue. He just called to say he had been in San Jose and now he was in a hotel in downtown L.A.”

Cousert left his Orange boardinghouse Sept. 1 after a dispute with his landlady over the rent, his mother and aunt said.

Family members began their frantic search when they discovered that Cousert left almost all his possessions, including a prized computer, behind.

“He panics easily,” Morris, who lives in Burbank, said. “He just drops things and runs.”

Why Cousert chose to go to San Jose remains a mystery, family members said. Cousert apparently found temporary work in San Jose as a flagman for a construction company. When the job came to an end, he took a bus back to the Los Angeles area. “He held up a sign saying ‘will work for food’ and got some odd jobs that way,” Morris said.

Wiersema said the flagman’s job was the first employment Cousert had in more than three years. Cousert, who was looking for a job in Los Angeles, could not be reached for comment.

Family members said they hope to get Cousert enrolled in a program for disabled adults and into a supervised living arrangement.