You're reading: Dead ends so far in week two of search for missing American doctor

As the search for Jay Sloop, a retired American doctor, enters its second week, one of his three son’s said that all leads so far have turned up empty and that an unspecified number of cadaver dogs are to arrive from Germany either on May 29 or May 30 to help in the private hunt.

 “We’ve been chasing down leads
that have just petered out; I’m sure they’re well-intentioned but they’re just
not genuine,” said Randy Sloop, who is
coordinating the private search for his father in Kyiv.

He added that
alleged findings of Jay Sloop have surfaced at the KFC restaurant in Kyiv’s Ocean
Plaza and as far as the southern city of Mykolayiv.

Police are
treating the 77-year-old former obstetrician’s bizarre disappearance as a
criminal case classified as intentional murder, and have launched a nationwide hunt
for him, with customs and migration services under notice at border checkpoints.

Randy Sloop told
the Kyiv Post that he has supplied the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine with video
footage and has a scheduled meeting with the police in the late afternoon of May
28 to hand over printouts of “people of interest” caught on video.

Jay Sloop of
Washington State went missing on May 14 following a traditional morning walk he
took in Kyiv’s Podil district and was last seen at 7: a.m. near the entrance of
Zamkova Hora Park, video feeds show.

According to
his grandson, Jeff Sloop, on the day he went missing, he wore dark-blue
trousers, a striped, light-blue button-up shirt with clip-on suspender, and had
on a pair of tennis shoes.

Hundreds of thousands of posters of missing American physician Dr. Jay Sloop have been hung up and distributed throughout Kyiv.

He had been
in Kyiv since May 8 on a medical mission for the Seventh-Day Adventist Church,
for whom he works as a health care director at the church’s regional
headquarters in Spokane, Wash.

Quoting Randy
Sloop, his brother Greg Sloop blogged: “The U.S. Embassy has said (this disappearance)
is extremely rare. It seems very difficult to imagine that he could just get
lost, slip and fall, those kinds of things. I think it’s likely there’s some
kind of criminal element here. What the motivation would be would just be wild
speculation.”

When the
Kyiv Post met with police search and rescue officers on May 20 in Zamkova Park,
they said they hadn’t ruled out criminal activity in Jay Sloop’s bizarre
disappearance.

Local and
American volunteers, including the police and three American search and rescue
personnel have thoroughly searched the Zamkova Hora Park wooded area.

Randy Sloop
said his father had no known medical conditions.

An
undisclosed award is being offered for information leading to Jay Sloop’s
discovery at 093-936-8305 or 093-986-9246. Ukrainian- and Russian-language
speakers can also call the police at 102.

Kyiv Post editor Mark Rachkevych can be reached at[email protected].