A Minister Vanishes into Thin Air
Rev. Thomas Sullivan, a prominent Tacoma mission leader, has disappeared without a trace, echoing a mysterious vanishing act from his past in Chicago.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The family and friends of Rev. Thomas Sullivan, the pastor of the Center Street Congregational mission in Tacoma, are greatly exercised over his continued absence. He disappeared last Wednesday while ostensibly heading to Seattle on business. He was known to have boarded a boat, but he never arrived at his destination. Mr. Sullivan had been acting strangely of late, struggling with memory loss. Two years prior, he disappeared from his home in Chicago and was not located for nine months. A man of about 5 feet 6 inches with a dark mustache, his disappearance has left his wife, who is seriously ill, in deep distress.
“Mr. Sullivan is said to have acted strangely of late and had difficulty in remembering the day of the week and the month.”
Missing person cases involving mental health crises remain a tragic feature of our civic life; while modern technology provides more ways to track individuals, the vulnerability of the unhoused or those in mission-based care remains as present as it was in 1903.
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