After days of court appearances and hand-wringing in the press, radio legend Casey Kasem has been found alive and well in Washington state.
Kasem was with his wife, Jean Kasem. Police who located him say that he was doing fine and was receiving proper medical care for his advanced Parkinson’s condition. According to police, the Kasem’s were visiting on vacation.
The whole thing started when Kasem’s adult children went to court to get an order from a judge to locate their father. They said he had been checked out of a medical care facility, they did not know where he was, and that his life and health were in jeopardy due to his Parkinson’s condition.
A judge granted daughter Kerri Kasem a temporary conservatorship for her father while they tried to find him.
The entire case seems like a false alarm, at this point. But the Kasem kids say that their stepmother is trying to keep them from their father. She says they are money-grubbing and just want his sizable estate, coming around and feigning interest in his waning years. The kids say they want none of his money.
The feud between Jean Kasem, who has been with casey since 1980, and his kids from a previous marriage, is a longstanding fight.
So far, there is no explanation regarding the Kasem kids’ insistence that their father should never have been removed from his care facility. They say that he is too frail for travel, and that he would have had to be transported in a plane that was specially equipped for such a condition.
Initially, there was a concern that Kasem had been taken out of the country entirely, which really concerned his kids.
Kasem himself is unable to speak nowadays. But in his heyday, he was the voice of American Top 40 radio, listened to each week by millions of people.
Image via YouTube