CDC employee who left work after feeling unwell is still missing

[Dammit Carl!]

Yeep! -- he's going to end up in the Missing 411 database, you guys!!

I tell people about this (the 411 thing) and they think I'm nutso; spooky stuff. 

[Barthheart]

He's been found.... sad end....

https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/05/health/timothy-cunningham-cdc-body-found/index.html

[JasonPratt]

Yes, I was talking earlier about the conditions under which he had been found and went missing. It's a horribly tragic event, and it's also more than a little weird, in ways that fit several dozen other men being found dead in or near urban areas in bodies of water in recent decades. (There have been so many in Manchester, that the locals have come to believe a serial killer called "the Pusher" is doing it. A New York detective and a forensic pathologist studying similar cases across Northeast America, came to the conclusion some kind of serial murdering cult is doing it, based on clear evidence that the victims they focused on had only recently been placed in the water before being found. Not true in this case, according to the CME.)

That particular article adds a few details which are confusing. The CDC is being a little inconsistent about whether they denied him a promotion he wanted, since they were the source for the original idea that he had been denied a promotion back on Feb 12th (the day he apparently drowned, based on the current forensic data). He was a highly successful professional, so it's a bid odd that he was so emotionally fragile that he promptly went home, put all his personal belongings down, put on his jogging gear, and leapt into a river to kill himself out of depression. That isn't strictly impossible, but there are other aspects to the case that aren't adding up yet. I'd like to hear more about the police tracking him by video cameras in "his last moments" (per one of the other articles I linked to). Whatever they could see that way, hasn't helped them understand what happened yet.

Another bit of additional confusion comes from a disparity in the CNN article (linked by Barth) and information from one of those prior articles I linked to, regarding his parents. In the CNN article he tries to get in touch with them late the prior night before he died (and before he was refused another promotion, evidently), by voice mail and text, but the parents didn't get them until later and the content was so minimal as to be simply a request to talk. But in the other article, the parents reported that the texts and phone calls (apparently plural?) worried them so much about him, that they spent the evening driving down to Atlanta from Maryland! -- they're the ones who arrived to find him missing on the 12th. I don't understand the discrepancy here yet -- maybe I've misunderstood the timing factors somehow, but there's a clear difference in the intensity of the contact with his parents in two of the stories. This suggests information the parents have decided, for whatever reasons, to be quiet about releasing.

The possible contact here with other (usually) male (usually) urban water-death cases in recent decades, is a tendency in some of the cases for the victim to display signs of unusual mental breakdown before they go missing. This was connected by the New York criminologists with unnaturally high amounts of a paralyzing chemical found in the bodies of the victims they studied. If Dr. Cunningham was saying things so weird that his parents were convinced to drive down to Atlanta overnight to check on him, BEFORE he went to the meeting where he was refused another promotion, that points to a biochemical problem which the refusal could have exacerbated in his behavior. (Or, maybe what was affecting him led the CDC to decide to refuse the promotion he otherwise had expected, on a spur of the moment? Don't know yet, but the CDC have been somewhat inconsistent about whether they refused him a promotion or not. It's possible that's just political correctness covering however.)