Missing Adventist Doctor’s Body Found in Indiana: Teleka Patrick Funeral
by Monte Sahlin
By Adventist Today News Team, April 15, 2014
Cable News Network (CNN) reported late last week that a body found in a lake in Indiana near a major highway was identified as Dr. Teleka Patrick, the young Adventist physician in Michigan who has been missing since early December. The body was discovered by a fisherman in Lake Charles, west of Gary, Indiana, on April 6, according to an official announcement by the Porter County Coroner's Office. Patrick's car was found in December on the side of Interstate 94 with a flat tire just south of the lake.
At the request of Patrick’s family, a second autopsy has confirmed her death was caused by drowning, Jim Carlin, a private investigator from Battle Creek hired by the family, told local news media in Michigan. Carlin said he was present for the second autopsy, but Patrick's family has still not ruled out foul play despite the fact that no signs of it were found. Kalamazoo County Sheriff Richard Fuller has officially announced that his office has completed its investigation and that Patrick died from accidental drowning. It will take several weeks for his investigators to get a toxicology report which would confirm the exact cause of death. Carlin said that Patrick's family still wants to know "what truly happened to her," although Fuller has stated that the case is "as solved as it is going to be."
The young doctor was 30 and went missing after working a shift at Borgess Medical Center in Kalamazoo where she was a first year resident in psychiatry with the medical school at Western Michigan University. She had graduated from Loma Linda University in the spring of 2013 with a medical degree and a Ph.D. in biochemistry. Her car was reported the same night and Indiana State Police arrived at the scene about 10 minutes after a caller reported seeing the vehicle in the ditch, but Patrick and the car keys were gone. Several searches were conducted in the area, but this was in the middle of one of the most brutal winters on record in this part of the Midwest.
Patrick's funeral is scheduled for 10 a.m. Friday (April 25) at Mount Sinai Seventh-day Adventist Church in Orlando. There are also a number of memorial services scheduled across the United States, as reported by Rex Hall on Michigan Live (mlive.com). On Thursday (April 24) a memorial service will be held at 6 p.m. in Kalamazoo (Michigan) at Trinity Temple Adventist Church on East G Avenue and at 7 p.m. in New York City at the Linden Adventist Church. In Loma Linda (California) a memorial service is planned for April 28 at 6:30 p.m. in the University Church. More memorial services are being planned at Oakwood University, in Hyattsville (Maryland) and in Jamaica.