PORT ANGELES – 18-year-old Nicholas Gaylord has been found and appears to be in good condition. A citizen spotted him wandering in the Four Seasons neighborhood in the Morse Creek area east of Port Angeles. Sheriff Sgt. John Keegan called in this report.
“At approximately 8:45 this morning, he was seen by citizen in the Four Seasons Park area near the intersection of New Bridge, walking out of the woods, and a citizen recognized him from social media and contacted him and said ‘Are you lost ?’, and he said that he was, and she’s like, ‘Well, I think I know who you are. So let me let me call the police and get them here to help you’, and she provided him with some some food some water, and Deputy Leiter arrived a short time later and talk to him and we drove him home.”
Gaylord, described by his family as schizophrenic, was reported missing Monday at about 1:00am, after neighbors had reported he had been knocking on doors and tried to enter someone’s house before being chased off.
Keegan says the Morse Creek drainage runs down from Gaylord’s own neighborhood, and it appeared he had been lost in the woods overnight. He was cold, wet, tired and scratched from the heavy brush, and his family plans to take him in to see a doctor for a quick check-up, but Keegan said he seemed to be in pretty good shape.
Gaylord told deputies he went for a walk and got lost. Keegan says a search party of Border Patrol agents and a prison inmate recovery team were just deploying when they got the call that Gaylord had been found.
“Yeah, I’d like to thank people for their patience and then you know, the community’s involvement in trying to help. The border patrol for helping us. The area that they were going to go is pretty treacherous and we wanted to eliminate any hazards that he may have been injured in, and then the prison team because there was a large area of land that had numerous amounts of outbuildings, and maybe possibly thinking houses in the area that we would have to go and knock on doors and search that huge entire area for him, and they, you know, without hesitation volunteered to come and assist us.”