Officer found alive, barely, in Las Vegas parking lot

Thursday, Oct. 22, 1998 | 11:31 a.m.

Bones were sticking out of his face. He apparently had been beaten. He weighed 92 pounds, down from his normal 165. He was dehydrated, emaciated, penniless and had no identification.

He apparently had a stroke and spent three months in the University of Las Vegas' hospital as a John Doe. An FBI check of his fingerprints turned up nothing. Then he changed hospitals and his condition got worse.

"My first goal was to find out who this man was," said Jodi Clark, a discharge planner at Boulder City Hospital in Nevada. "I thought, there's got to be someone missing him."

After some time in a hospital bed, he was able to write the words "John Moorehead" and "Pittsburgh" on some paper and point to Pittsburgh on a map.

Some more work linked Moorehead, a former police officer for Allegheny County, with relatives in Pittsburgh who had been frantically looking for him for months.

"He's alive. We know where he is," cousin Gracie Kizzie told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "Baby, we've been blessed."

Moorehead, 49, left his home in the Pittsburgh suburb of Green Tree for a two-week Las Vegas vacation on June 16.

He was a police officer from 1979 to 1993 but was fired for a series of problems that Tom Fitzgerald, the county's safety services director, would not elaborate upon. Moorehead had sued the county over his firing.

He was also troubled by his fatal shooting of his father in 1984. The two men had been arguing in Monroeville, a Pittsburgh suburb, with the father on the balcony and the son in a parking lot, said David Palermo, a Monroeville police lieutenant.

A shot the son fired ricocheted off something in the parking lot and hit the father, John Moorehead Sr., Palermo said. At a coroner's inquest a month later, Moorehead was cleared.

Moorehead hoped the trip to Las Vegas would help him sort through his problems, said Kizzie, his cousin. He had moved out of the house he shared with his wife, Geneva Moorehead, and their two sons.

After getting to Las Vegas, Moorehead called Kizzie to tell her he had hooked up with other travelers and was fine.

"After two more weeks, when we didn't hear from him, we became concerned," said Kizzie, a psychiatric social worker at Allegheny General Hospital.

He was found by construction workers a month later, looking so bad that Las Vegas police felt they could not publicize his picture to try to determine his identity.

"At the time, it didn't look like he was going to make it," Detective Jeff Rosgen said.

Doctors speculated that Moorehead had a bruise on his brain that caused amnesia.

Authorities sought Moorehead's family, and his family was looking for him, but the two could not hook up until hospital worker Clark persuaded an operator to give her an unlisted Moorehead telephone number and called it.

"All the credit goes to Jodi. She went well beyond her scope," said Barbara Platter, a spokeswoman for the Boulder hospital.

Kizzie then flew out for a visit, jogging Moorehead's memory a little.

"When I walked in the door, the first thing he said was, 'Hey, I know you,"' Kizzie said.

His weight is up to 100 pounds, but doctors say his right side is paralyzed and he may never walk again. He may be able to take a plane to Pittsburgh for rehabilitation next week.