Identity question answered
Apparent amnesia victim a well-educated former chef
SEATTLE – The man who wandered out of Discovery Park three weeks ago suffering from apparent amnesia is Edward F. Lighthart, according to friends who recognized him from his photograph published Thursday in the Seattle Times.
Friends have e-mailed photographs of Lighthart, and he acknowledges that the man in the photographs is he.
“The name isn’t ringing a bell, but the image is definitely me,” said the man, who had been at Swedish Medical Center as Jon Doe since he walked out of the park.
While he didn’t recognize his name, he said that might happen down the road.
Within hours of the story’s posting online, a reader identified Jon Doe as Lighthart, an English teacher he knew in China. The reader, David Akast, said Lighthart taught at English schools in China and “had an incredible knowledge of European cultural history.”
Another friend, Randall Snyder of Columbus, Ohio, said he knew Lighthart from the mid-1990s when they attended the Union Institute in Cincinnati together.
He said Lighthart was a high-caliber chef in New York but left that profession following an accident. He then moved to Cincinnati to attend the Union Institute.
Snyder, who hasn’t seen Lighthart since the late 1990s, said Lighthart left the school without graduating and moved to Europe.
He said he has a huge art collection. “He is a very, very brilliant man and knows art like nobody I know,” Snyder said.
Lighthart learned he’d been identified when a nurse showed him a picture and other information about his past. He was flustered at first, he said, and asked the nurse to continue calling him “Jon.”
“I guess there’s a little bit of relief and at the same time a lot of anxiety,” Lighthart said a few hours later during an interview. “I’m still not sure quite what to make of it all.”
Other records show that Lighthart, born in December 1955, graduated in 1974 from a high school in Tucson, Ariz.
Seattle police said that now that they have Lighthart’s birth date, they’re trying to find family, friends and colleagues, said Tina Drain, with the Seattle Police Department missing persons office.
John Lucas, a spokesman at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said Lighthart graduated in 1984 with a bachelor’s degree in French. He also attended the Culinary Institute of America.
Lighthart wandered out of Discovery Park wearing pressed khakis and had $600 in his sock. He said he didn’t know who he was or when he was born. He is fluent in English, French and German and has a professorial knowledge of European cultural history.
He remembered attending the Culinary Institute of America in New York and being a chef.