VANCOUVER - A 79-year-old Chilliwack man who went missing earlier this week has been found dead, Mounties confirmed Saturday.
A release from the RCMP's Upper Fraser Valley Regional Detachment confirmed that the body of Ioan "John" Pop, who was last seen around 4 p.m. Tuesday, had been recovered.
Pop suffered from severe dementia. His disappearance on Tuesday was not the first time he had wandered off, according to his daughter Monica Wickham.
Wickham told CTV News Vancouver earlier this week that her family had previously been able to locate Pop because of a GPS tracking watch that provided alerts on his whereabouts to family members.
That watch had recently stopped working, and the family was in the process of getting a new one, Wickham said.
She said there was also an alarm on the door, but her mother - Pop's wife - was doing dishes in the kitchen and didn't hear it go off when he left.
In their release, police said Pop's death is not considered suspicious and thanked the public for their efforts to find him.
Chief among those efforts was a Facebook group dedicated organizing civilian searches for the missing senior.
Some of the group's members were also members of a similar group created over the summer in hopes of locating 86-year-old Ethal "Grace" Baranyk, who went missing on July 13. Baranyk was also found deceased, more than a month after her disappearance.
Pop was the third person over the age of 75 to go missing in the Fraser Valley since July. In addition to Baranyk, 82-year-old Valentina Kushnareva was reported missing after going mushroom-picking near Cultus Lake earlier this month.
Kushnareva has not been found.
