A 60-year-old man with the cognitive functioning of an 8- to 10-year-old has been missing since midday Saturday, last seen standing in front of St. Josaphat Ukrainian Catholic Church in Parma just as thousands of people packed the area for the city's annual Ukrainian Village Parade & Festival. Parma police say Andrew Rasper was dropped off at the church by a friend from his group home in Seven Hills and was last spotted at 12:15 p.m. wearing a black Rolling Stones t-shirt, blue and black plaid shorts, and a brown and orange ballcap with Cleveland written across the front in orange.
According to Cleveland 19 News, the Parma Police Department has asked the public to help locate Rasper, describing him as very social but noting he has no prior history of walking off alone or leaving the person he is with. Officers have thoroughly checked the area where he was last seen, near the church at 5720 State Road, and both nearby agencies and St. Josaphat festival security have been advised of his disappearance, per the same report.
A Festival Crowd Complicates the Search
The timing of Rasper's disappearance lines up with one of Parma's biggest community gatherings of the year. St. Josaphat Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral, which sits across from Ukrainian Heritage Park, hosted the Ukrainian Village Parade & Festival on the same day, an event that draws an 11 a.m. parade along State Road along with ethnic food vendors and large crowds, according to event listings. That stretch of State Road, between Tuxedo Avenue and Grantwood Drive, was officially designated Parma's Ukrainian Village commercial district by city council in 2009 and serves as the cultural hub for the region's Ukrainian-American community, per Wikipedia.
Rasper's group home is located in Seven Hills, an adjoining suburb that borders Parma's eastern edge and shares major thoroughfares with the city, per the same source. The short distance between the two communities meant Rasper was only a few miles from home when he went missing amid the festival's heightened foot and vehicle traffic.
How Ohio Handles Missing Adult Cases Differently
Unlike missing children, adults like Rasper do not automatically trigger the kind of Wireless Emergency Alert tones that buzz cell phones during an AMBER Alert. Under Ohio Revised Code Section 5502.522, local police can request an Endangered Missing Adult Alert through the state's Bureau of Criminal Investigation when a missing individual has a developmental disability or mental impairment and faces a credible threat of harm, according to the Ohio Legislative Service Commission. It was not immediately known whether Parma police had formally requested that alert for Rasper.
Those adult alerts instead rely on text notifications, email blasts, social media sharing, highway message boards, and news broadcasts rather than the piercing phone alarms tied to child abduction cases, per the Ohio Association of Broadcasters. That distinction places extra weight on community members and local news to spread descriptions like Rasper's quickly. When the state has issued these alerts in the past, the results have been largely successful — in 2022 alone, the Ohio Attorney General's Office issued 146 Endangered Missing Adult Alerts across 38 counties, and all but one of those missing individuals were located or returned home.
Second Vulnerable-Adult Search in Parma This Month
Rasper's disappearance marks the second time this month that Parma police have publicly appealed for help finding a vulnerable resident. Eight days earlier, on August 14, Hoodline reported that officers were racing to locate an 80-year-old woman missing from the suburb. Residential group homes for adults with developmental disabilities in the county, including the one where Rasper lives, operate in coordination with the Cuyahoga County Board of Developmental Disabilities, which oversees community-based housing and support services across the region.
Anyone who sees Andrew Rasper is asked to call the Parma Police Department's nonemergency number at 440-885-1234 and reference his name. The department, based out of the Parma Justice Center at 5555 Powers Boulevard and staffed with more than 100 personnel across patrol, detective, and K-9 units, also maintains a Detective Bureau Crime Tip Line at 440-887-7340 for anyone with additional information.
