Peace Corpsman’s Body Is Discovered
Washington The Peace Corps said that a body believed to be that of missing volunteer John S. Parrott of Sarasota had been found in an African forest yesterday. Police were investigating the possibility of suicide. According to reports reaching Washington, the body was discovered in a wild, remote region in Lake Nakuru National Park, 100 miles northwest of Nairobi, Kenya.
Parrott, 22, has been the object of an intensive Kenya police search since Oct. 30. “There was no evidence of foul play (but) there are possible indications of suicide, according to police and a Peace Corps official who went to the scene,” a Peace Corps statement said.
Parrott was last seen Oct. 30 in Nakuru. The day before, had told fellow Peace Corps volunteers he was going to take a weekend trip to Turbo, several hundred miles away on the Ugandan border and would return Oct. 31 to Nairobi. He failed to meet a chartered flight which was to take him to his duty station at Ferguson’s Gulf on Lake Rudolf on Nov. 1
Parrott arrived in Kenya in Jun 1965. He was the son of Mrs. Marietta A. Parrott, and John C. Jones, Littleton, Colo. He was a graduate of Sarasota High School and attended Florida State University in Tallahassee. He took his Peace Corps training at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.
Earlier yesterday school teacher Tor Borander sighed the body through his field glasses while watching a rare animal known as a rock hyrax on a rock escarpment about 40 yards above the southwest shore of Lake Nakuru.
“The sighting was an extraordinary coincidence as the trees and boulders obscured all but a small patch of clothing from view. The area itself is in a wild and remote location, near a dirt road traveled only by naturalists” a Peace Corps spokesman said. Police pathologists in Nairobi are now conducting an autopsy aimed at establishing positive identification and exact cause of death, the Peace Corps said.
Tampa Bay Times, 16 Nov 1965, p 8
Family 052 in the catalog of American P rr tt Families