An 80-year-old Long Beach woman with cognitive impairment who disappeared Sunday afternoon has been found safe, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department announced Monday. Yanlin Gao was last seen around 2:30 p.m. Sunday in the 4600 block of Los Coyotes Diagonal, prompting an urgent public appeal for help locating her.
The update came Monday evening in a post from LA County Sheriffs,
the department’s official headquarters account, which said the “at-risk missing person” had been located. The announcement followed a bulletin describing Gao as an Asian woman who stood 5 feet 7 inches tall and weighed 145 pounds, with black hair and brown eyes, according to
MyNewsLA
.
Before she was found, authorities said Gao was wearing a black shirt, black pants, black shoes and a black backpack, per the same account. Her disappearance near Los Coyotes Diagonal in Long Beach raised concern in part because of her cognitive impairment, a detail also reported by Patch.
What broader guidance says
The Alzheimer’s Association says six in 10 people living with dementia will wander at least once, although that general statistic does not establish that Gao has dementia or explain what happened in her case. The organization advises beginning search-and-rescue efforts immediately and says many people who wander are found within 1.5 miles of where they disappeared; that guidance does not describe Gao’s search or recovery. A separate July 2024 case involved former Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca, 82, who was reported missing after wandering from his home in San Marino and was later found, according to NBC Los Angeles. Unlike the update in Gao’s case, that report described where Baca was found and said several law enforcement agencies joined the search.
Public Appeal Preceded the Update
Ahead of Monday’s locate confirmation, the LASD Missing Persons Unit asked anyone with information to call 323-890-5500, the station’s report noted.
The case drew coverage from multiple local outlets over the roughly 24 hours between Gao’s disappearance and the location update. Patch was among the first to report her disappearance, describing her simply as an “80-year-old woman with cognitive impairment” who had gone missing in Long Beach.
Details about where or under what circumstances Gao was ultimately found have not been released, and the sheriff’s department’s brief update did not elaborate beyond confirming she had been located. Her condition following the discovery has also not been disclosed.
