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Family members still seek missing man

Craig Zeldow (Photo provided)

SARANAC LAKE — Family members of Craig Zeldow haven’t given up their search for him, more than eight months after he disappeared and was last seen in this village.

His sister-in-law Janice Akins plans to travel here next month from her home in southern California to post missing-person flyers and to visit Zeldow’s last known whereabouts.

“We don’t know if he’s still alive or not, but we’re not ready for it to just go away, just in case he is out there,” Akins said Friday.

Zeldow, who turned 65 in December, cleared the few belongings he had out of his Lake Flower Avenue apartment at the beginning of October, paid rent to his landlord and told him he’d be going out of town for a while. He hasn’t been seen or heard from since.

Zeldow’s family contacted village police in late October when they hadn’t been able to reach him.

“It’s still an open case,” police Sgt. James Joyce said Friday. “There are some paper-trail-type things we’ve regularly checked in on, but we’ve not turned anything up so far.”

Akins said her last contact with Zeldow was an email exchange in August of last year. She said it wasn’t unusual for him to go long periods without checking in with family.

“He’s a little bit off-the-radar guy himself, just by nature,” she said. “He’s reclusive. But he’s never disappeared before without any notice or anything like that.”

Zeldow, originally from the Binghamton area, is an “Adirondack boy” who loves the wilderness, Akins said. She said he lived in both Tupper Lake and Saranac Lake over the last few years, but he doesn’t get around very well as he suffered from diabetes and a leg injury that left him with a significant limp. He also has poor vision, Akins said.

“Craig was quite the outdoors man except he couldn’t be an outdoors man anymore because he was limited physically and vision-wise,” she said. “His brother and sister, they fear he probably went for a long hike and took his insulin and might have given himself an insulin overdose, in which case he might be deceased and his body might be discovered by hikers.”

“There’s speculation he took a bus somewhere. My fear is he took off and something happened and he might be at a (mental health) facility. Even though he had a California ID, who knows if he carried any of that on him?”

A friend of Zeldow’s traveled with him to Jamestown Falls in the town of Piercefield over Labor Day weekend last September, where the last known picture of Zeldow was taken. Joyce said in December that state forest rangers returned to that area to search for him after he was reported missing but found no sign of him.

Zeldow had no car and hasn’t used his credit or debit cards since he was reported missing, Joyce said.

“In other missing-persons cases we’ve worked, there are people who’ve seen the person or can give you the next place to look, but we just don’t have that yet,” Joyce said.

Akins and her brother will be in Saranac Lake from Aug. 6 to 9 to try and find some new leads in the case.

“We’re going to spend a few days poking around and looking at the things that we do know,” she said. “We know where he lived, and we know he visited the library a lot, and I know what store he shopped at and stuff. I know he saw a physician’s assistant in Lake Placid. I’m going to visit his old landlord in Tupper Lake.”

“If she’s able to shake something out of the bushes, obviously that’s a positive thing,” Joyce said.

Zeldow is 6 feet tall and approximately 170 pounds with close-cropped hair. Anyone with information about him is asked to contact the Saranac Lake Police Department at 518-891-4422.

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