California man was missing for 25 years, then his sister saw his picture in the news
LASSEN COUNTY, Calif. (KTTV) - Deputies in Lassen County in Northern California have identified a man who had been missing for 25 years, the department announced, after he had spent months unidentified in Los Angeles County hospitals.
In a Facebook post, the Lassen County Sheriff's Office said they got a call last week from a woman who thought she saw a picture of her long-lost brother in a USA Today story. The story, published in May, was about a man who had spent a month at St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood, but staff hadn't been able to identify him. According to the article, the man was found on April 15 in South LA.
A GoFundMe campaign allegedly organized by the man's sister, Marcella Nasseri, identified the man as her brother Tommy.
"My little brother, Tommy, had been missing since August of 1999," Nasseri wrote in the GoFundMe campaign. "He just vanished with no trace. Not even his vehicle was ever located."
A deputy from Lassen County reached out to St. Francis after getting the call. Hospital staff told him that the man had since been transferred to another hospital. After confirming the man was still there, the deputy reached out to the Los Angeles Police Department. An LAPD detective went to the hospital to fingerprint the man, and the fingerprints came back as a match to Tommy.
Nasseri said she was "delighted" to find Tommy alive. "All this time I had been looking for unidentified remains," she wrote. Now, she said she's working to transfer her brother up from LA County to Lassen County. Lassen County is just northwest of Reno, Nevada.