Columnist Susan Snyder: Dying Vegas man needs a connection

Sunday, Jan. 16, 2000 | 9:35 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Sundays and Tuesdays. Reach her at snyder@ vegas.com or 259-4082.

Anybody out there know Gil Carlton Myer?

Susan Parker needs to know. Myer has been a patient on her floor at Loma Linda University Medical Center in California since Nov. 30, and the nurse said he isn't expected to be there much longer.

Myer is dying, and Parker has no idea who to tell.

The 49-year-old man suffers from brain damage that further impairs his ability to recall names and faces every day.

"In the next few weeks his brain function will be completely gone," Parker said. "This is somebody's loved one."

Myer was struck by a car in Barstow. That's how he ended up on Parker's floor in the first place. Physicians then discovered damage to Myer's brain, which may have been there before the accident or caused by it.

Parker can't give too many details because of patient confidentiality rules. But she says Myer's problem is serious, and every hour counts. She wants to find some family or a close friend.

She wants to find someone, she says, who can sit with him through the final, fragile weeks of his life.

"This man's brain is deteriorating," the registered nurse said. "The white matter is being eaten away by the damage. Each day is very important."

Important because with every passing day, Myer is able to tell Parker and her staff a little less about himself.

His driver's license says he used to live in Las Vegas. That and the clothes he wore were all the personal effects he had with him when he was brought to the hospital.

Myer is white, 6 feet, 1 inch tall and had black hair and dark brown eyes. English is his first language, but he is fluent in Japanese. Parker says she thinks his mother may have been Japanese.

"He talks a lot about Japan. He is fixated on Okinawa. He says he has a brother named Brian," Parker said. "I showed him a map of Las Vegas, and he just looked and looked at it. You can see him trying so hard."

Parker sent a Las Vegas friend of hers to the West Reno Avenue address listed on Myer's license. After getting Parker's request for information in writing on hospital letterhead, his former apartment manager told her it had been about a year since he lived there.

The next-of-kin number he listed in those records has been disconnected.

Parker says Metro Police and the FBI have exhausted all of their leads, but she refuses to give up.

On Tuesday, where she worked on the case from home, she found an old friend of Myer's in San Francisco. The man said Myer worked for Super Shuttle of San Francisco in late 1998, and he thought Myer had a girlfriend in Japan.

Interesting information, but not enough detail to help someone who needs help in a hurry, Parker said.

She realizes she is precariously tripping along just about every boundary of professional ethics by relating Myer's medical and personal information to strangers over the telephone. But Parker says she knows firsthand how hard it is to die the way Myer is.

"I lost my mother to a similar disease," she said. "I may be breaking all the rules, but I'm not going to stop until I find somebody who can be with him."

People who think they might know Myer can call Parker at work, (909) 824-4393, or at home, (909) 789-9358.