Special Olympics Athlete Found Hundreds of Miles From LA

Andi Gusmari, 44, walked into the Hayward police department on Monday morning

A pair of Special Olympic athletes reported missing were found Monday, officials said.

The first athlete from Albania was found hundreds of miles from where he was last seen near the University of Southern California campus, hungry, but OK, officials said.

Andi Gusmari, 44, of Albania who walked into the Hayward police station about 2 a.m. on Monday. He had been reported missing on Saturday around 8:30 p.m. when he got separated from his group after going to the bathroom at the USC campus.

Gusmari, who speaks Albanian and has a speech impediment, told his brother that he took a bus some of the way from Los Angeles, about 350 miles south of Hayward. Still, how he ended up all the way in Alameda County is still a mystery. 

"We don't know how he got there," Jeff Carr, Chief Operating Officer of the 2015 Special Olympics World Games told NBC LA. "That's a question that everyone has." Carr added that he had a birth certificate and identification on him to help police figure out who he was and called Los Angeles authorities.

Hayward police tried to communicate with Gusmari through an Albanian translator, but were unable to gain much more information about the circumstances behind his arrival at the police station, said Sgt. Ruben Pola of Hayward Police Department.

Gusmari told police he was happy to be at the station and had been looking for a police department before he made it to Hayward. When Pola repeatedly asked Gusmari how he got up north, he kept answering, "I don't know."

And on Monday afternoon, police said the second missing athlete was found in Inglewood. Shion Isimel, a French-speaking Special Olympian, was last seen at Los Angeles International Airport and was reported missing earlier in the morning.

Shion is a table tennis competitor from the Ivory Coast.

 NBC4's Jonathan Lloyd and Kate Larsen contributed to this report.

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