Every single day nine people are reported missing in San Antonio.
Many are found. But some cases go cold, with no new leads leaving families with lingering hope, unanswered questions and a painful void.
According to police records, at least 2,770 people have been reported missing in the city since January. Another 583 people were reported missing in Bexar County over that same time period.
This year, San Antonio was among the top 10 cities in the U.S. for unresolved missing persons cases, along with Houston and Dallas, according to a report by the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.
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. Share your stories with us through this form.
“I don’t think people have any idea to the degree people are going missing,” said Lori Wittmeyer, case manager for Search and Support San Antonio, a local organization that helps families bear the costs of searching for their missing loved ones. “The community needs a better understanding of the depth of the issues here in San Antonio.”
Each missing person’s file goes into the stacks of cases that officials within the San Antonio Police Department and the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office are tasked with investigating.
One Bexar County detective is currently working 42 active missing persons cases, and at SAPD, a team of 16 agents were working on 153 cases together as of Oct. 23.
Not every case is handled the same way by law enforcement — some are immediately investigated, while others are not.
When Suzanne Clark Simpson, a real estate agent and mother of four, went missing from Olmos Park on Oct. 7, her husband Brad Simpson was arrested and jailed two days later. He now faces a murder charge, even though she still hasn’t been found.
The turning point of the investigation happened when Olmos Park Police Department called on the Texas Rangers to assist with the investigation.
Immediately, it set off multiple searches in Olmos Park, Boerne and at a landfill in San Antonio. The state also activated a CLEAR alert, deploying resources and the staff OPPD didn’t have, increasing the amount of media coverage to her case.
For those San Antonio families of color whose loved ones have gone missing, they can’t help but see another example of racial bias in the media coverage and police response to some cases over others.
“Perception plays a big role,” said Abel Peña, a retired FBI detective who now leads Project Absentis, a Helotes-based organization that works to solve missing persons cases. “What about somebody on the East or West Side that goes missing? There is an inherent human police bias there … This happens with [people] of color.”
When someone goes missing, law enforcement relays that information to the National Crime Information Center and to NamUs, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, a publicly available national database.
According to those reports, 70% of people still missing in Bexar County are people of color.
Meanwhile, the cases continue to stack up.
“It’s not because they’re bad people and they don’t care, it’s because it’s like one detective for [several] missing persons cases. And I just don’t know how they do it sometimes,” Wittmeyer said. “They just can’t seem to catch a break because of the numbers.”
Outside the Simpson family home on Oct. 9, missing persons advocate Frank Treviño told the San Antonio Report the case reminded him of 29-year-old Bianca Carrasco, who was reported missing on May 1, 2016, after she went missing from her Northside home, leaving three children behind.
“There’s a lot of similarities,” he said.
Treviño has helped law enforcement crack missing persons cases for two decades now by piecing together timelines and finding specific areas to physically search.
At the time of her disappearance, Carrasco was a cancer nurse at a local clinic who had planned to leave her husband.
Carrasco’s sister, Jovanna Burney, who didn’t live in San Antonio, reported her missing two days later. According to police records, police learned that Carrasco’s husband emptied out his wife’s bank account and took her phone away.
Carrasco’s husband drove to Odessa the same night she went missing, leaving their two oldest children at home alone until the next day, Burney said.
When Burney informed Carrasco’s husband that she couldn’t get in touch with her sister, he called police, but the officer “didn’t take it as a missing person, so no report was done,” according to a May 3, 2016, SAPD report.
Over a recent phone call, Burney sounds angry, fueled by years of grief. She’s asked SAPD to call for assistance from the FBI or Texas Rangers and to release information on where to organize searches.
“Anyone can see clear as day there wasn’t enough done. Bianca is a Hispanic woman, and we live in Texas, and it’s San Antonio. We’re the majority. I would be scared to go missing there,” she said. “Are they going to come find me? Am I going to be as important?”
“I just don’t understand why. Why was my sister not as important?” she said.
Data shows who goes missing
In San Antonio — a city with nearly 66% of residents identifying as Hispanic or Latino — it is impossible to know exactly how many Latinos are going missing.
Data obtained through public record requests show that SAPD only categorizes victims by race — not ethnicity. They are recorded as white, Black, American Indian/Alaskan Native, Asian/Pacific Islander and unknown.
The only data available to get an idea of how many Latinos go missing in San Antonio is by looking at Bexar County’s metrics, which include Hispanic/Latinos as an ethnicity to identify people who go missing in unincorporated areas of San Antonio.
According to BCSO data, of 583 missing persons reports this year, 290 were identified as Latinos, surpassing data reported for white, Black and Asian people.
Still, the data provided by SAPD tells a story. Of the local missing persons cases to date this year, about three-quarters are teens or juveniles who are reporting as having run away from home and roughly half of them are women.
Some are children taken by a non-custodial parent and hundreds more are adults. Some are especially vulnerable, such as seniors, people with disabilities, people who are abused by their partners and people involved with drugs, according to SAPD.
Regardless of the reason why someone is missing, law enforcement does not respond the same for each missing persons case.
SAPD Sgt. Washington Moscoso said the department responds to each case with urgency, but the exact response depends on many factors such as where or how far away the victim might be.
For example, if someone wants to report a 25-year-old who has been missing for a month, an active search will likely not be as exigent, or pressing, as a search for a toddler or senior who has recently wandered off, he explained.
“It’s truly a case-by-case basis, depending on how soon the loved one calls from the last time they had contact,” Moscoso said. “We do have a sense of urgency in every case … We’ll deploy [resources] when we have a good likelihood of finding them within a certain radius.”
Names, not numbers
Pauline Cantu Diaz’s family has been searching for her every day since she went missing 14 years ago on Dec. 6.
Diaz, then 63, was last seen leaving her job at H-E-B at the intersection of S.E. Military Drive and Goliad Road on San Antonio’s South Side, where she made tortillas.
Diaz never received her last Christmas gift from her daughter. It’s still wrapped and stored in the closet.
No one has ever been arrested for Diaz’s disappearance. Her case remains an active missing persons case with the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office, sitting under stacks of many more recent missing persons cases.
Her daughters, Paula Diaz-Martinez and Juanita Diaz Flores say there were initial delays and communication issues with law enforcement and a turnover of assigned detectives over Diaz’s case. Although she went missing in San Antonio, her vehicle was found nearly an hour away in Floresville.
“I feel that because of her age and because she’s Hispanic, I think they said, ‘She lived a long life, she’s gone.’ That’s how we felt. That’s how they treated us. She’s not a priority,” said Diaz-Martinez in a Sept. 8 interview.
Katelyn Vara, a 26-year-old West Side mother in recovery, went missing in August.
“There are a lot of people missing in San Antonio. A lot. Male, female, moms, dads, teenagers, and young children,” said her childhood friend and San Antonio resident Cecilia Chapa in a TikTok video posted Oct. 11. “[Many] are Hispanic or come from a lower income area of San Antonio.”
Chapa told viewers that it took several attempts to report Vara missing “because [Vara] didn’t meet the criteria,” she said the police department told Vara’s family.
Vara was last seen Aug. 6 after attending a substance abuse treatment appointment five blocks away from her Loma Park home.
Vara’s mother, Valerie Mendoza, worries that her daughter’s record had something to do with how police responded.
“I told them what happened, and they didn’t seem too concerned,” she said, showing two incident reports from calls she made to SAPD on Aug. 12 and 13.
“They ran her name, I guess they saw that she had a record, that she had warrants,” she said.
Annie Salcido’s daughter, Jeanie Chavez, has been missing since July 18. She’s a mother of two children and struggled with drug addiction and homelessness and had reported experiencing domestic violence before she went missing. She was last seen on the North Side.
Salcido said she tried to report her daughter missing, but police told her Chavez was an adult and could leave if she wanted to.
“They didn’t take this case until August,” she said.
Search and Support San Antonio on Sept. 16 led an active search for Chavez at a body of water at the Southside Lions Park Trailhead. A small group of people showed up wearing boots and holding walking sticks. They were there to find any signs of Chavez.
Salcido finds some hope in believing her daughter is still alive, though she fears she’s being trafficked in another state.
“I don’t know what’s worse, being gone in heaven or us missing her. I lay there at night, thinking about what could possibly be going on with her. It’s horrible. As a mom, it’s horrible,” she said.
Finding a way forward
Over the course of the San Antonio Report’s reporting, which began in September, of the dozens of people who went missing in San Antonio, the general public is aware of only a fraction. At least nine of them still haven’t been found, including Simpson, who was last seen alive in Olmos Park in October.
There is no public-facing website, dashboard or database that shows who is actively missing in San Antonio. Texas has a state site, but not every local case shows up.
And because law enforcement only generates missing persons flyers at the request of the family, the public would only know someone is missing if the information was widely shared on social media, if families have the time and transportation to put missing flyers up across neighborhoods, if they purchase ad space on a billboard or if the story is reported in the news.
In San Antonio, situations in which people who go missing are often a reflection of the city’s larger social issues, including mental health struggles, drug use and domestic violence, law enforcement and activist sources all said.
“The community has a responsibility to get police involved in these cases where there’s abuse involved,” Peña said. “There’s a lot of missing women out there.”
