Gabriel Nagy, the family father who disappeared and was found alive 23 years later

The next disappearance took place in Sydney, Australia in 1987. Gabriel Nagy at the time was married and was the father of two children, Jennifer, 9 years old, and Stephen, 11.

Gabriel worked as an installer to help retail stores build commercial spaces around Sydney. He loved his job but he wanted to be an accountant and that’s why he started going to classes at night to achieve his goal.

On January 21, 1987, Gabriel phoned his wife Pam to tell her that she would be home at lunchtime. Pam prepared the food and waited for him for hours. But Gabriel never came back.

The next day Pam received a call from the police to inform her that they had found her husband’s car burned on the side of the road with no one inside, and that is why they reported his disappearance thinking that something terrible could have happened to him since this man had never been absent from his house without telling anyone.

They put up signs all over Sydney hoping that someone had seen something or knew what happened to Gabriel after the accident.

Investigating their bank accounts, they saw that Gabriel had withdrawn money from an ATM in Newcastle, about 150 kilometers from Sydney. It’s the only thing the police found about him and Pam had no explanation for this.

Nor did he have answers to explain Gabriel’s sudden disappearance, whom everyone described as a good husband and a loving and caring father.

Over time, Pam and her children moved home, but she made sure that they were always in the phone book in case her husband wanted to come back. The years passed and they came to the conclusion that he was dead.

But 20 years later and only two weeks before an investigation officially declared him dead, Georgia Robinson, the person in charge of the case, found something.

As part of the preparations for the court hearing, he made a final search and Georgia found a Medicare record in the name of Gabriel Nagy.

This led them to find the whereabouts of Gabriel who also called himself. Ron Saunders, and they discovered that he lived in Mackay 1600 kilometers from where he had the accident.

When Georgia contacted Gabriel, he was very scared since he didn’t remember anything about his past life or his family but she tried to reassure her by saying that she was a missing person and that that was not a crime.

Georgia went to Mackay to see him and during this visit she asked him many questions.

Life had been hard for this former store installer and accounting student. He once had a job, a comfortable home, a family he loved, but he didn’t remember any of that.

Gabriel said that he had been living under the name of Ron Saunders for a long time, but that he had begun to remember what his real name was.

He also remembered being in Newcastle, where he said that he bled profusely from a head wound. He had a scar on the back of his head and he believed that that injury was the cause of his amnesia.

The last 20 years were mostly blank, but Gabriel remembered that he was offered shelter and work on a farm in Rockhampton, as well as occasional jobs on fishing boats and construction sites in Queensland.

Sometimes he slept on the street or camped on the beach while taking refuge in alcohol.

In Mackay, he met Pastor Barry Hayhoe, a truck driver turned into a church man who saw something in Gabriel that was worth saving. He offered him a room at the River of Life Church and a job as a caregiver.

Gabriel stated that what he did was take the opportunity to stay away from the streets.

It was the pastor who helped him get a Medicare card with his original name when Gabriel needed it for cataract surgery, which was discovered by Georgia.

This woman showed him photographs of her family and little by little she began to remember.

He also gave him a letter from his daughter Jennifer, another from Pam and letters from his parents where they told him that he could contact them as soon as he was ready.

That afternoon Nagy sat down to write a seven-page letter on both sides for his wife and children, and 3 days later he received a text message from his daughter on an old mobile phone that had been given to him.

He said ‘Hello dad’ and according to Gabriel that was enough to make him cry.”

His daughter told him that she had read the letter and that she loved him very much. Then Pam called him and they were talking until the battery ran out.

Two weeks later, Jennifer, who was then 32 years old, flew up. Mackay to see the father I had only known as a little girl.

At the airport, Gabriel received his daughter with a large bouquet of flowers and they both merged into a big hug as soon as they saw each other.

Finally, Gabriel stayed in Mackay but maintains constant contact with his parents, his wife and their now adult children.

Jennifer told her story to the media to show others what it means for a family to have answers when someone disappears.

She believes that her father developed a condition called dissociative escape, probably because of an attack or accident that occurred shortly after the phone call he made to his wife.

This is a rare psychiatric disorder that causes memory loss and often causes people to move away from their families.

Jennifer wants to give people the hope that sometimes good things can happen, that miracles can happen.

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Sources:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gabriel-nagy-severe-amnes_n_1747869/amp