A troubling case of a missing elderly hospital patient has concluded with the discovery of his body in a bushy roadside area of Ebinboro, Saint Vincent, drawing new scrutiny over the search effort launched after he disappeared from the island’s main public hospital.
Sixty-one-year-old Selwyn Joseph, a resident of Hamilton on the island of Bequia who was widely known by his nickname Millie, was found dead shortly after midday on Saturday, exactly 10 days after he went missing while receiving inpatient care at Milton Cato Memorial Hospital. Local youth making their way through the wooded corridor in the West Kingstown community stumbled across his remains, according to details obtained by iWitness News.
Sources close to the investigation have confirmed that foul play is not currently suspected in Joseph’s death. One individual who viewed the body told reporters that minimal decomposition suggests Joseph likely died only shortly before his remains were located, rather than in the immediate days after he disappeared from the hospital.
The sequence of events that led to Joseph’s disappearance began on the night of June 25, when the disoriented patient was redirected by a nursing staff member after he accidentally headed to the wrong hospital room within the emergency department, where Joseph had been assigned a bed. The nurse reportedly escorted Joseph back to his assigned space, but roughly 60 minutes later, local police received an anonymous tip that a man matching Joseph’s description, with an IV line still attached to his hand, was walking toward the Edinboro area.
When hospital staff checked his room, Joseph was nowhere to be found. A nurse and an ambulance crew were immediately dispatched to search the nearby Kingstown and Ottley Hall regions, but the first search operation turned up no sign of the missing patient. Formal notification was then made to police, who issued a public missing person bulletin to aid in the search.
The following day, June 26, the Ministry of Health made a public appeal for assistance via its official Facebook page, asking community members to keep watch for Joseph and help bring him back to safety. The post noted that Joseph was a disoriented emergency department patient who had left the facility, and that he may have become lost in a neighborhood close to the hospital. It added that hospital teams, family members, and police were already conducting active searches, and thanked the public in advance for any cooperation or information they could provide.
As of the confirmation of Joseph’s death, neither law enforcement nor public health officials have released an official statement on the case or responded to growing questions about the scope and intensity of the search effort conducted over the 10 days Joseph was missing.