New York, August 10, 2026
Photo: CrimeStoppers
The 83-year-old leader of the Bulgarian Orthodox Diocese of the USA, Canada, and Australia has been found safe in a Manhattan hospital, two days after he went missing from Hell’s Kitchen, thanks to a sharp-eyed local news outlet that connected a reader’s photo to an NYPD missing-person alert.
His Eminence Metropolitan Joseph, who’s headed the diocese since 1986, disappeared from the neighborhood Friday morning. He was last seen near West 42nd Street and 9th Avenue around 10 AM. Less than 30 minutes later, FDNY got a call about a pedestrian struck by a vehicle at West 47th Street and 10th Avenue, and EMS took someone to a nearby hospital. At the time, nobody realized the two incidents were connected.
Photo: W42ST
That changed when W42ST, a Hell’s Kitchen news outlet, got a photo from a reader named Deborah Gaffaney showing an elderly man being carried on a stretcher at the scene of the collision. When NYPD put out its missing-person appeal for Metropolitan Joseph on Saturday morning, W42ST’s deputy editor recognized his distinctive white beard and dark clothing as matching the man in Gaffaney’s photo.
The outlet passed the photo and details along to police, who were then able to trace him to a Manhattan hospital. A detective later told W42ST that a discrepancy in the spelling of Metropolitan Joseph’s surname had kept investigators from linking the hospitalized patient to the missing-person report sooner.
He remains under hospital care. Police haven’t released further details about his condition.
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