Over the course of our Missing in San Antonio series, we documented the stories of eight people who are missing in San Antonio through numerous phone calls, home visits and text messages with family members and friends who have been searching for their loved ones.
This story includes as much as could be corroborated through police and background reports. Some individuals’ identifying details have been left out unless they have been named a person of interest by law enforcement. No one has been charged in the disappearances of these people.
If you have any information on a case, call the SAPD Missing Persons Unit at 210-207-7660 or the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office at 210-335-6000.
To submit a protected, anonymous tip to Project Absentis, a nonprofit organization of retired and former detectives who search for missing people and collect evidence, call 726-777-1359 or email [email protected].
Bianca Carrasco
Bianca Carrasco was a 29-year-old nurse and mother when she walked away from her Longs Creek neighborhood on the far North Side of San Antonio on May 1, 2016.
But her sister, Jovanna Burney, said Carrasco would never leave her three children behind.
In the days leading up to her disappearance, Carrasco had been involved in an argument and wanted a divorce. She had planned to hire an attorney to gain full custody of her children.
Her husband told Burney he assumed her sister left home voluntarily after leaving her wedding ring, without saying where she was going.
Burney made him call the police to report her missing, so he did, but no missing persons report was generated.
According to Burney, Carrasco’s husband conveyed to police that Carrasco had an affair and probably ran off with another person, an allegation that Burney believes had an impact on how the case was handled.
Police records detail how Carrasco’s husband also emptied out his wife’s bank account and took her phone away. Burney said he told her that he drove past Carrasco on his way to work in the early morning hours of May 1, leaving their two oldest children at home.
Missing in San Antonio is a multi-part series by the San Antonio Report on people who go missing and the people who work to find them.
Read the first installment here.
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According to Burney, SAPD’s Homicide and Missing Persons Unit told her that without any more evidence or finding her sister, no one could be held responsible for her disappearance.
When Carrasco went missing in 2016, Child Protective Services began to investigate and temporarily removed the children from Carrasco’s home. Burney alleges police didn’t use information from the interviews with CPS, which could have helped the investigation, she said.
“Part of me thinks that she’s a Hispanic woman. Our mother is in prison, my father wants nothing to do with this, so you have that as a factor, almost as if they weren’t going to take me seriously. I was in my early 30s and I’m also a Hispanic woman,” Burney said.
Burney described her sister as a caring mother and a nurse who formed friendly relationships with the chemotherapy patients at the oncology clinic where she worked.
“She should be found. This is a solvable case,” she said.
Police aren’t required to spend any number of hours on “pending further investigation” cases, also known as cold cases — the designation that’s been assigned to Carrasco’s case, according to SAPD. They work on them as leads come in, so unless there’s credible information coming to police, Carrasco’s case is considered cold.
Even though it’s been eight years, Burney hasn’t stopped searching for her sister. She has given several interviews to nonprofit organizations dedicated to helping find missing people, to YouTubers who make videos on the case and to anyone who will listen. But she has to step away sometimes to recover, then come back and do it all over again.
A selfie of Carrasco smiling under the words “MISSING SINCE 2016 BIANCA CARRASCO. CALL SA CRIME STOPPERS” was shown on a billboard near I-10 near Wurzbach Road for about a month.
Burney also recruited another organization, Project Absentis, to actively search for Carrasco. Its director, retired FBI Agent Abel Peña, publicly posts statements and videos, calling for Carrasco’s husband to take a polygraph test. Although it’s not admissible in court, he says the test can help pinpoint where Carrasco may be.
Burney continues to ask SAPD to release cell phone location data from the night Carrasco went missing so she can organize searches in those areas and wants police to question Carrasco’s husband. Carrasco’s cell phone has never been recovered. Its last known location was the night she went missing at her home.
Carrasco is 5 feet, 1 inch tall, has brown hair that was shoulder length when she went missing and has brown eyes. She is right-handed and has a large scar on her abdomen and the letter “B” tattooed on her left hip. She turned 38 on July 24.
Jeanie Chavez
When Jeanie Chavez moved to San Antonio from San Pedro, California 10 years ago, she purchased a home and enjoyed working with children in foster care and residents at an assisted living facility. Then an addiction took over her life.
She became dependent on painkillers and lost custody of her daughters, ages 2 and 10, before seeking help at a rehabilitation center. But she left before she could finish the program.
Her mother, Annie Salcido, learned Chavez was missing when a romantic partner called and informed her Chavez had left on July 18, leaving all of her things at home.
“I knew right off the bat that was a lie, so I reported her missing,” she said. Salcido lives in California, but kept calling the SAPD at least five times a day to ask about her daughter.
She said a lack of urgency from law enforcement is what fueled her idea to hire a private investigator to search for her daughter, a luxury many families can’t afford.
“She’s an amazing mother, she is a good person, she’s just chosen this type of life. Her addiction has taken over her life,” Salcido said.
Police took the missing persons case in August.
Chavez’s missing persons poster includes a photo of a bruised eye. She had reported alleged domestic violence to SAPD a month before going missing.
Recently, she learned through her daughter’s medical records that her daughter was pregnant at the time of the reported assault.
Although her case is labeled “at-risk,” law enforcement has not called a search at a specific area for Chavez, because there has been no evidence of a crime or a body, Salcido said.
Search and Support San Antonio, a local nonprofit organization that helps families bear the costs of searching for their missing loved ones, led searches for Chavez after talking with homeless people who shared information on where she had been seen.
Salcido feels like law enforcement isn’t doing enough. “I see no sense of urgency,” she said.
“They don’t care because she was an addict. They don’t care because the lifestyle she was living wasn’t perfect. She wasn’t a real estate agent, she wasn’t a nurse … She made poor choices and she was living a lifestyle that was reckless,” she said.
“I’m angry,” she said. “It’s not just my daughter. It’s millions of families that don’t get answers, that don’t have closure.”
Chavez may not be in San Antonio anymore and may have been in a black and tan 2008 Ford Explorer with the license plate PSJ5380, according to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System database NamUs.
She is 5 feet, 6 inches tall, has dark brown eyes and brown hair. She has several tattoos, including a rose with a spider on the right side of her neck, an owl on her middle finger, and butterflies with a sword on her right forearm. She has the word “kindness” on her right shoulder, bows on her calves, and a photo of her little brother with angel wings on her back. She will be 33 in March.
Jorge Garza Perales
Jorge Garza Perales talked to his mother every day. They texted and called each other all day long so that she wouldn’t worry about him from where she lived in Mexico.
Until Aug. 21.
His mother, Ana Lilia Perales Ruiz, was one of the last people he made contact with the night he went missing. Two days had passed when his family began to seriously worry about the unusual silence.
“He would communicate with me when he woke up so I could bless him,” Perales Ruiz said over the phone from Linares, Nuevo Leon, Mexico. “I thought about what was going on because he was excited about his landscaping job.”
His close friend Anita Garcia, who lives in San Antonio, tried to report him missing, but because she wasn’t a family member, Garza Perales’ family had to come from Mexico to report him missing — a process that took nearly a week longer.
When Perales Ruiz arrived at her son’s home in San Antonio, she saw all his things were there, even his Mexican passport.
When Garza Perales’ family reported him missing, police told his mother he could have left voluntarily.
“Since he’s an adult, they didn’t start looking for him right away. Police thought maybe he left, didn’t want anything to do with family,” his mother said in Spanish.
But she said that wasn’t possible, because he was close to his family and didn’t have any problems with them when he disappeared.
“His birthday is Dec. 21. Tomorrow,” she said in a Dec. 20 interview. “What we want is for God to bring my son home, to give me that miracle and give me good news. I trust a lot in God.”
Garza Perales came to San Antonio for work. He’s a landscaper who started taking work at only $25 a yard and had celebrated getting large contracts for work the days before he went missing.
The circumstances surrounding his disappearance aren’t clear.
The Bexar County Sheriff’s Office has only one detective in its missing persons unit, who is investigating the case.
“I think they need more help in this area of missing persons. They have done everything they can legally and possibly do, but personally because I knew him, I feel like it’s not enough. I want to be out there looking and looking until we find him or some answers,” Garcia said.
Garcia had to stop speaking for a moment, thinking about how hard it is to live every day, not knowing.
“Am I looking for him in distress? Am I looking for him being held against his will? Am I looking for him gone because he wanted to be gone? Did something happen to him and he no longer has life?” she asked.
The family has sought help from Search and Rescue SATX, a volunteer organization that helps families search for missing persons. The group is leading searches in areas where Garza Perales may be and helping share information about the case. When possible, his family travels to San Antonio from Mexico to look for him.
Garza Perales is 5 foot, 8 inches tall and has black hair and brown eyes. Garza Perales’ silver Nissan Sentra is also missing. It has a Texas license plate that reads SSS6443. He would be 27 today.
Pauline Cantu Diaz
Pauline Cantu Diaz went missing from an H-E-B parking lot on San Antonio’s South Side on Dec. 7, 2010. She had just moved back to her home in San Antonio after separating from her husband.
“He told me no woman leaves him, he leaves them,” Cantu Diaz’s daughter, Paula Diaz-Martinez, said he once told her when her mother was still alive.
It’s been 14 years since she last saw her mother, a loving, family-oriented grandmother who made tortillas at H-E-B.
Since then, their family has been torn apart, Diaz-Martinez said, with one sibling disassociating from the reality that their mother is missing and two others who have made the search for her central to their lives.
The case started in Wilson County, where Cantu Diaz’s car was found empty along a grassy area of U.S. Hwy 181 and Farm-to-Market Road 320 near Floresville.
There was turmoil almost right away, Diaz-Martinez said, when the case was handed off between the Wilson County and Bexar County sheriff’s offices and slowed by turnover of detectives who either quit the department or got promotions.
Diaz-Martinez and her sister Juanita Diaz Flores look for closure every day since their mother went missing.
In 2018, the sisters asked the BCSO to take the case again, alleging that in 2010, Wilson County didn’t dig in a spot where a cadaver dog had signaled the presence of human remains. In 2018, Bexar County dug in that area and found a pig skull, putting an end to that lead.
The family hired a private investigator early on to help find clues of where Cantu Diaz may be. Charlie Parker, the private investigator working the case, now helps the family pro bono.
He believes Cantu Diaz was quietly killed by someone she may have known.
“She’s so small and … that’s wooded country out there. Across from her house was like 30 acres of wood, and down the street is woods,” he said.
Two years after she went missing, Cantu Diaz’s estranged husband filed for divorce in 2012 and remarried another woman, who nine years later in 2021 filed a restraining and protective order against him.
There have been no arrests and the case is pending further investigation, due to a lack of circumstantial evidence. BCSO only has one detective investigating missing persons cases.
In September, Search and Support San Antonio unveiled a new billboard that will be up for a year near where the car was abandoned.
“We really need to target Floresville like we’ve done San Antonio,” Diaz-Martinez said.
Cantu Diaz was 4 feet, 11 inches tall, had brown eyes and wore wire-rimmed glasses. She had pierced ears and curly, gray short hair which ended about halfway down her earlobes. The day she went missing, she had been driving her 2010 white Tacoma with the license plate AA48807. She would be 77 today.
Cindy Gausline
Cindy Gausline was last seen leaving her Eastside apartment on Sept. 15, where she lived with her three children and friends.
She didn’t have a car, and she didn’t tell anyone where she was going.
A Facebook Messenger phone call from Gausline that night worried her family, making them believe she may be in danger.
“All I know is that they said she said she was scared and the call disconnected,” her brother JC Gausline said. “When she walked out the house, she was laughing and said ‘I’ll be back later on, if not, I’ll be back before the morning.’”
Her family filed a missing persons report with SAPD the next day, informing them that she had depression and that she had left her personal belongings in her apartment.
In the three months since she went missing, they haven’t stopped passing out her missing persons flyer and posting about her on social media.
Her case has been labeled as endangered missing, meaning police believe she went missing under suspicious circumstances or that she may be in danger.
“She loves her kids. She’s a typical mom,” JC Gausline said.
The family’s ask to the general public is to “look around, look at people” in case Gausline is spotted in public.
Gausline is 4 feet, 11 inches tall, has red hair and hazel eyes. She also has unique tattoos, which include a Virgo zodiac symbol on her left wrist, cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants on her right arm, an infinity symbol with the words “through thick and thin” on the left side of her chest, and the name “Thomas” in red ink on her left shoulder. She would be 31 today.
Kassanda Gonzalez
It’s been a year and four months since Kassandra Gonzalez’s family last saw her. She went missing on Aug. 11, 2023.
She’s a mother of four from Laredo who grew up and lived in San Antonio. She often posted about hanging out with friends and posted selfies with her children on social media.
But she had been hanging around with a bad crowd before her disappearance, her sister Alyssa Ballard said. Ballard lives in San Antonio, and constantly posts about her sister missing online.
The day before Gonzalez went missing, she filed a restraining order against the father of her youngest children and was in the middle of a custody battle.
“He was a really bad drug user,” Ballard said. “She was fearing for her life and she said she wanted to escape that and get custody of her kids, so it’s kind of weird she wouldn’t keep contact with her kids if she was doing that.”
A friend picked Gonzalez up after her shift at a local cell phone store on Aug. 11, 2023, and drove her home, where she packed up her belongings and left. She was texting specific people that day looking for a ride home and making plans to meet.
That friend was questioned after her makeup bag was found in his car. Police also took cadaver dogs to a ranch he frequented, but ultimately, there was a lack of evidence to charge anyone in connection with her disappearance.
“The cops said she’s an adult, she got a ride from him. They did look into him, … but they advised me the case was closed because of a lack of evidence,” her sister said. SAPD says that the case is still an active missing persons case, classified as “at-risk.”
“They didn’t listen to me, really. That’s the thing that frustrates me the most,” Ballad said. “It’s very stressful, it’s very frustrating that law enforcement won’t continue to help me, even with leads, I believe it’s a good reason to question [more] people.”
Ballard said she’s angry and believes her sister’s case could be investigated further. She wants to know Gonzalez’s phone’s last known location, but because there’s no evidence that she was killed, “there’s no reason for them to go digging through her phone records,” she said.
“It’s hard to just be waiting around to see what’s going to happen, if she’s dead or alive or if she’s being trafficked. It’s really hard, especially during the holidays … waiting around for some type of answers.”
Gonzalez is 5 feet, 2 inches tall, has brown hair, brown eyes and may wear glasses. She was last seen wearing a black Cricket mobile shirt, blue jeans and large gold hoop earrings. She has several distinctive tattoos, including the name “Gonzalez” on her stomach in cursive, “respect my mind” in cursive on her back, a Pisces zodiac symbol on her foot, and piercings on her tongue, nose and belly button. She would be 31 today.
Amalia Garza
The last time Daniela Valdez saw her sister Amalia Garza was six years ago. The mother of three went missing on March 1, 2018, after telling her family she was going to a party with her boyfriend’s family.
That night was also the last time Valdez spoke to her sister on FaceTime, but she couldn’t see her face because it was dark — a detail she’s still trying to make sense of.
“That’s one of the things I initially thought: … ‘Are you trying to hide something, a bruise or something?’ It wasn’t the signal at all,” she said.
Garza used to speak to her mother or text every day. That communication stopped suddenly on the day she went missing, Valdez said.
Her family didn’t report her missing until April 2018, after being advised by police to see if she returned on her own.
“They told us we had to wait because she was an adult and she probably went somewhere and that she’d probably show up,” Garza’s mother Sylvia Gonzalez recalled. She called her daughter “Molly.”
That made Gonzalez anxious. She said she had seen a bruise on her daughter’s face before and learned that her boyfriend at the time would lock her inside a room.
“I said, ‘don’t go back. He’s going to end up hurting you or killing you … I’m not afraid of anybody. I will stand up for you and I will take any bullet for you,’” Gonzalez recalled in a recent interview, her voice breaking on the other line.
“And since then, I would check on her, knowing what he had done to her,” she said.
Two years after Garza went missing, her boyfriend was charged with aggravated kidnapping for holding a different woman against her will, taking her phone away and sexually assaulting her. He’s out on bail for that charge, but has not been charged or named as a suspect in Garza’s disappearance.
According to Garza’s siblings and mother, her boyfriend’s family has not cooperated with them.
“Sometimes we think maybe … she’s buried somewhere,” Valdez said. “And then other times, we’re questioning, is she out there drugged up to the point where she doesn’t even know who she is or where she belongs, or she’s just out in the streets, not being taken care of or wandering around, not knowing?”
Garza’s mother lives in Pearsall today, going on every day without her daughter. On Dec. 14, she shared flyers with people who stopped by her table at a Mexican restaurant parking lot on 1 U.S. Hwy 46, north of 281.
On a hot pink billboard nearby, Garza’s information and photo is on display for drivers to see until July 2025, made possible by Search and Support San Antonio and funded by Season of Justice, a nonprofit organization that helps families search for their missing loved ones.
It was placed there intentionally, a few miles away from where Garza’s boyfriend’s family lives and where they believe she could be buried, Gonzalez said.
Garza is 5 feet, 1 inch tall. She has brown hair, brown eyes, and straight hair with wavy parts in it. She has a tattoo of a butterfly inside her right wrist. She would be 46 today.
Katelyn Vara
Katelyn Vara, a mother with a little boy at home, abruptly stopped communicating with her family and did not return home after an Aug. 6 medical appointment to treat substance abuse just five blocks away.
She didn’t have a car or a driver’s license, so she walked like usual.
It took Valerie Mendoza three attempts to report her daughter missing.
“They said she didn’t fit the criteria. She had free will and was able to leave and never return if she didn’t want to. I told them, that’s not what’s happening here,” Mendoza said.
The second time she tried to make a report Mendoza said she asked the operator when the situation would become a missing persons case.
“He said like over a month or so,” she said. “They didn’t want to listen after they saw her [police] record and ran her name.”
It wasn’t until Mendoza went to the West Side substation and refused to leave without a missing persons case number that Vara was a reported missing person.
“I was very upset. They totally disregarded me like she was nothing,” she said. “Regardless if she has a substance abuse problem, she’s still a human being and deserves help as much as any other person.”
On Aug. 11, Mendoza discovered that someone else had her daughter’s phone while desperately trying to contact her.
The person insisted Vara had sold them her phone and that they had no idea who she was.
According to Mendoza, police have found evidence inside a vehicle that may belong to Vara, but detectives warned her the Bexar County Crime Lab has a monthslong backlog.
“I just want them to find her,” she said.
Vara is 5 feet tall. She usually wears her long brown hair in a ponytail, and has brown eyes. She has a facial piercing under her right eye, and a mole on the right side of her forehead. She would be 27 today.
