VENTURA : Search Renewed for Alzheimer’s Patient

Ventura County sheriff’s deputies renewed the search Tuesday for a missing 72-year-old Alzheimer’s patient after the man’s family consulted two Illinois psychics who indicated that the man had fallen into a barranca in east Ventura.

The search turned up no sign of Bob Fasig, who wandered away from the Mound Guest Home at 5430 Telegraph Road about 9:30 the morning of May 8.

Although he had only been there a week, Fasig had left the guest home three times before, said Mercy Porras, assistant manager of the facility. She said he apparently climbed over a 6-foot fence surrounding the facility after he received a phone call from his daughter and a letter from his wife.

“He wanted to go home,” said Fasig’s wife, Mary Stubbie, 71, of Atascadero, who had intended to leave her husband in the home only temporarily while she recuperated from surgery.

Tuesday morning, Fasig’s sister and brother-in-law from San Luis Obispo, appealed to Ventura County sheriff’s deputies to revisit a barranca that winds from Camino Real Park to Telegraph Road near the Mound Guest Home, Sheriff’s Lt. Arve Wells said.

Mary Fasig said her family focused on the theory that her husband had fallen into the barranca after two psychics in Illinois described an area “with rocks in the bottom, rather steep, and with a little water.”

Also, one of the psychics told Fasig’s daughter, who had earlier searched the barranca, that she had walked past the spot where her father had fallen.

During the search, two sheriff’s deputies spent about three hours walking the length of the barranca, but turned up nothing. A sheriff’s helicopter joined in the search.

Fasig, a retired Air Force pilot who once flew jets over Korea, is 5-foot-10, weighs 139 pounds and has gray hair and hazel eyes. He was last seen wearing blue jeans, a brown shirt, a navy sweater and a Mound Guest Home armband.