Ralph Brown, former Cornelius mayor and vice principal at a local middle school. pictured at one of many community events he organized.

Carol Brown heard the news she was waiting on for a year: Her husband of more than 50 years, Ralph, had been found.

“I can finally sleep,” she said, after getting a call late last week about the discovery of her husband’s remains.

Ralph Brown’s family said they were overwhelmed by mixed emotions of euphoria, relief and grief. It had been three days short of a year since their patriarch – and a longtime community leader – went missing without a trace.

On May 13, Adventures with Purpose – an Oregon-based group dedicated to recovering cars from waterways and helping solve missing persons cases – sent out a diver to search Roger’s Landing, a Yamhill County park and entrance to the Willamette River.

They’d already scoured the location three times in the past year.

But this time, 100 feet out from a boat ramp and 40 feet deep into the Willamette, under a submerged pile of tree branches and trunks, they found an upside down blue Nissan Sentra. The windows were still up and a body was inside. A few days later, dental records confirmed it was the remains of Ralph Brown.

The 76-year-old former mayor of Cornelius and Hillsboro educator had left his home May 16, 2021. After a Sunday of running errands with his wife, Ralph, who had been suffering from early onset Alzheimer’s disease for two years, stood up from his recliner and said, “I’m going home,” then left.

Ralph’s driver’s license was no longer valid, and he hadn’t driven a car in over a year. But in episodes of confusion, particularly at night in what is known as sundowners syndrome in dementia patients, Ralph talked often about his childhood home in Astoria.

He drove away from his house in Cornelius, where he’d lived for 50 years and raised a family, and never returned.

A few hours later, Brown finally answered his cell phone after family members had been frantically calling. The last person he spoke to was his daughter, Laurie Saunders.

“I’m in the bushes at a golf course,” he said. “Are people looking for me? You’re looking for me, aren’t you?”

Brown’s disappearance mystified the community, amassing broad support in a months-long search effort. Dozens of volunteers, some who knew Brown closely and others who didn’t, searched hundreds of miles across Oregon.

A Facebook page dedicated to finding him is filled with posts from former students, friends, colleagues and locals who revered and respected Brown. Posters and fliers with his image and physical description – 5-foot-10, white hair, blue eyes and a missing tip to his right pointer finger – are still scattered across McMinnville, Forest Grove and Hillsboro, the suburbs west of Portland where his family mapped out his last known location using pings from a cell phone tower.

It was the last ping – just south of Newberg – that finally solved the mystery.

Ralph Brown pictured with his granddaughter Megan Closson at her wedding.

Every day during his commute to work as a physical education teacher in Hillsboro, Daryle Brown drove past a large billboard displaying his father’s missing person flier.

“I’d always say hi to him,” Daryle said. “Sometimes I’d ask, ‘Where the hell are you, Dad?’”

For the past year, every day the sun came out, Daryle wanted to play nine holes of golf with his dad. Any joy or positivity the 52-year-old felt was shadowed by a heaviness in the back of his mind. He’d question, “Should I even be happy?”

Some of Daryle’s earliest memories, he said, are of a garage filled with yard signs and posters plastered with photos of his father’s “glorious” 1970s sideburns and horn-rimmed glasses Ralph Brown sported during his first run for mayor of Cornelius, the small town which lies along the Tualatin Valley Highway between Forest Grove and Hillsboro.

As mayor, Brown was instrumental in adding an elementary school and the Virginia Garcia Medical Center to the town as its population boomed. He and Carol founded Cornelius Kids Inc., the area’s first youth sports program.

Brown was a social studies teacher, then a vice principal at Poynter Middle School in Hillsboro, where he retired (or “never graduated,” as Daryle says) and a school board member in Forest Grove.

Ralph Brown in his younger years as an administrator at Poynter Middle School in Hillsboro.

Brown was the kind of guy who said, “If you’re on time, you’re late,” Daryle said. His dad would wake up at 6 a.m. on family vacations to go running, and over the decades, he ran several marathons and organized more than 100 fun runs for charitable organizations.

Into his 60s, Ralph was still running with friends like Jan VanBlarcome.

“He’d tell me, ‘It’s not about how fast you go, it’s about finishing the race,’” VanBlarcome recalled. “That’s how he lived his life, too. To the fullest. He embraced it all. He loved his family, and he loved his community.”

It didn’t make sense to Daryle, or anyone who knew Brown, that he’d vanished without someone reporting a sighting.

Brown was friendly, outgoing and congenial, with a personality fueled by social interactions and connections with others.

“Even in his worst days of Alzheimer’s, he wouldn’t pass up a chance to talk to people,” Daryle Brown said.

Megan Closson, Brown’s granddaughter and Daryle’s daughter, said growing up she saw her beloved grandparents almost every day. “Papa Ralph” helped raise her, she said, and called her and all her cousins “partner.”

He’d stick out his right hand to show where the pointer finger was cut off in an accident and spin a tale to the grandkids, warning them it was severed by too much nose-picking.

The past two years, Brown changed, she said. He’d veer off into a blank stare, ask the same questions over and over again and couldn’t remember family members.

“Over the past year, we’ve obviously had enough time to grieve,” Closson said. “But even in the last three years, when Alzheimer’s started to change him, we had time to adjust and come to terms with knowing he’s never coming back.”

The search for Ralph Brown never really ended, despite the hopelessness, his family said.

“For the first week after his disappearance, we were harried and raw,” Daryle said.

Then, folks from different phases of Brown’s life came to help, Daryle said. Family and friends coordinated searches from Washington and Yamhill counties to the Oregon coast.

“The amount of people who helped try to find Ralph proved he was a pillar in the community,” VanBlarcome said.

For Jared Leisek, founder of Adventures with Purpose, Ralph’s case was one he couldn’t give up on.

“My gut was telling me, ‘We’re missing something,’ ” he said.

Leisek travels across the country on diving trips, documenting recoveries on his YouTube channel. Despite solving several cases in the past year, every time Leisek came home to Oregon, he thought of Brown, missing “in our own backyard.”

“He’s not just a former mayor of Cornelius,” Leisek said. “He’s a grandpa who I was drawn to, because my grandpa had the same stumpy finger, the same smirky grin.”

Leisek tracked the last location ping from Brown’s cell phone. Its 5-mile radius led him to the Willamette.

Using sonar, Leisek and diving partner Doug Bishop searched several waterways in the area and recovered six other cars in the three times they searched Roger’s Landing.

“We know that when a confused person gets behind the wheel of a car, they will often drive without stopping, even if that means dead-ending into water,” he said.

Leisek and Bishop decided to look a fourth time at the likeliest spot. A pile of tree logs, visible from the surface, and growing moss made the dangerous, potentially deadly dive even more difficult, he said.

But this time, Bishop returned to the surface of the water with a license plate number that had been plastered all over missing persons signs: Oregon 319 KQV.

“There’s a feeling that comes over you that I simply cannot describe,” Leisek said. “It’s like you already know that you’ve found who it is you’re really looking for.”

Ralph Brown holding his first great-granddaughter at a family Christmas in 2020.

Daryle Brown’s head was spinning when he got the news.

He didn’t know Adventures with Purpose was searching the river again.

“Not once did finding Dad come into my thoughts, it just felt so impossible,” Daryle said. “It felt like we were going to be mired in this forever.”

He ran through the school hallways at work and embraced VanBlarcome. They cried together in the staff room.

Megan Closson said she felt more happiness than grief as the saga finally came to a close.

“We can heal now because the worrying and the hopelessness is relieved,” said Saunders, Brown’s daughter.

The family is planning a celebration of life barbecue close to what would’ve been Brown’s 78th birthday in July.

This weekend, his youngest granddaughter, Olivia, will graduate high school in West Virginia.

The 18-year-old recently got her first tattoo. Just above her chest in small print is the word “partner” – the term of endearment Papa Ralph called all his grandkids.

–Savannah Eadens; seadens@oregonian.com ; 971-712-3423; @savannaheadens

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