An 82-year-old man with gray hair and hazel eyes has been missing since Friday afternoon after walking away from his home on the 4000 block of 48th Street in the Colina Del Sol neighborhood, and San Diego police are asking the public for help finding him. Kenneth Sims was last seen around 4:15 pm wearing a blue shirt, blue jeans and Skechers shoes, and officers have classified him as at-risk.
According to the San Diego Police Department, Sims is described as a white male standing 5 feet 7 inches tall and weighing 152 pounds. The department's notice, filed under Case #26500774, also states that Sims is known to frequent the MTS bus system, a detail that could prove crucial given how thoroughly public transit threads through his neighborhood.
Colina Del Sol, where Sims lives, sits in San Diego's Mid-City/City Heights area between El Cajon Boulevard and University Avenue. It's a densely populated, walkable community anchored by Colina Del Sol Park, with heavy pedestrian traffic and a mix of multi-family housing, according to background compiled by Republic Moving & Storage. Several MTS bus lines, including Routes 1, 7, 10, 15 and 955, run directly through the neighborhood, linking Mid-City to downtown and other transit hubs — any of which Sims could plausibly have boarded.
Why Time Matters in At-Risk Senior Cases
Under California Penal Code Section 14205, police agencies that take a report on an at-risk missing adult are legally required to process it without delay and enter case details into statewide and national missing-person databases within two hours, according to the Journal of Search and Rescue. That statute reflects the urgency built into cases like Sims', where missing-person reports take precedence over property crimes in the eyes of the law.
The stakes behind that urgency are steep. Research highlighted by an aging-advocacy group on Facebook found that roughly half of missing individuals with dementia or cognitive impairment who aren't located within the first 24 hours suffer severe injury or death, and that about 60 percent of people living with cognitive impairment will wander from safety at least once in their lives.
San Diego County itself carries a significant share of that vulnerability. An estimated 58,400 county residents aged 65 and older were living with Alzheimer's disease as of 2023 — about 11.8 percent of the county's senior population, according to data compiled by Stacker, which ranks San Diego 17th among California's 58 counties for senior Alzheimer's prevalence.
A Busy Stretch for SDPD's Missing-Senior Reports
Sims' case is not an isolated one for San Diego police this week. Just two days earlier, on August 29, officers launched a search in nearby Linda Vista for 68-year-old Peter Guardiano, a case Hoodline covered in a report on his disappearance. That case, #26500773, was assigned immediately before Sims' #26500774, underscoring how many at-risk senior reports the department has been juggling in a short span.
If local search efforts don't turn up Sims, state law gives police another tool: California's Silver Alert system, established in 2012 under Senate Bill 1047 and expanded in 2015 to cover cognitively impaired adults of any age. The system allows the California Highway Patrol to issue multi-county public alerts once local police exhaust their initial search resources — a mechanism that has been used elsewhere in San Diego County before, including in a case Hoodline reported on involving a missing 72-year-old driver whose Silver Alert spanned 600 miles.
Anyone with information on Sims' whereabouts is asked to contact the San Diego Police Department Communications Division at 619-531-2000 and reference Case #26500774.
