“I met a friend for lunch at Portugalete at 3.30pm.” It was one of the last words he said before leaving. “I don’t need money, just for the subway, he said he would invite me.” His name is Angel and his family has been looking for him for eight years.. His trace disappeared on October 6, 2015. Missing. No this. “I gave him five euros for the metro, told him to be careful… and we never saw him again,” complains his cousin and legal guardian, Maite. The last person to see him was another cousin: “He met Ángel near the Bolueta metro station, which he used when he went to Portugalete.” Route: 18 stations. Journey time is just over half an hour. But… “he didn’t come to dinner.”
During these eight years, his family researched and gathered information. “There were so many clues, comments and rumors.” There are many hypotheses, but none are conclusive at the police level. For the family, there was only one explanation for his absence: “Something had been done to him, he wouldn’t have disappeared like that without calling, without saying anything, of his own free will.” There was also a suspect who avoided official charges. His name rings again. “Eight years later, two different people referred us back to him.”
Alarm for night out
“As soon as it happened at night, I knew something bad had happened,” Maite begins. See, together with CASO ABIERTO, the events and investigation portal of Prensa Ibérica, eight years ago. “I’ll mingle a bit, I’ll leave a little later. Give me half an hour while I come…” he explains, “He often stayed at a friend’s house.or spent the night out, but never without warning.” This time he didn’t warn.
The call and message came many times from Portugalete, where the young man had many friends because he always lived there. “He was with me since he was 16, his mother died when he was 14 and he had a very bad time.“. Ángel hit rock bottom, they took him out of Portugalete and settled in with Maite and her family in the Otxarkoaga neighborhood of Bilbao. “That day – the last day – he left home in a very normal way. “There was nothing strange about the meeting, they were his friends, he didn’t come back and above all he didn’t warn, yes.”
The night wore on and Ángel did not return. He never did this. “We tried to contact his friends. I kept many of them on my agenda because I often used my cell phone to call,” his cousin recalls. “No, we haven’t seen him”, “no, I don’t know anything about him…”. The answers made the mood worse. “It seemed very strange to us…” Maite explains. “Angel? He couldn’t eat.” Anxiety increased. “We thought for sure something had happened to him, something had been done to him… The next day we went to report it.”
three complaints
“Jeans, yellow t-shirt, nickel with green and yellow stripes, New Balance sneakers,” Maite described. “He said he was going to go with some friends, but apparently he didn’t show up.” Ertzaintza agents recorded the first data, she says. “We told him that he had disappeared, that no one knew anything, that we were looking for his friends and said the usual things.” At the same time, relatives searched for Portugalete to see if they could find him. No one had seen her. Nothing led to it.
“Nervous, we returned to Ertzaintza to see if they had made any progress and asked if they knew anything…about what?” they said. He explains that the first surprise will be more. “We did not make any complaints… We filed a second complaint, but they didn’t want to accept it.” Ángel’s family claims one of the agents told them: “You will enjoy your life.” Maite and the other cousins repeated the same initial operation, hunting and searching in parallel with the researchers.
“An agent came and assured us that there was no missing person reported. We couldn’t believe it, we had to report it for the third time.”
“They were giving us clues: ‘I saw it at Lonja de Portugalete, I saw it there…”. The very large family was carried in large groups on every call. “During one of our searches, an agent appeared and told us that we could not investigate a single person… We told him that Ángel was missing… The agent assured us: There were no complaints for lost. “We couldn’t believe it, we had to complain for the third time.”
There is a difference of more than two weeks between the first complaint and the third complaint. “By the time the case finally reached the Missing Persons Unit, the footage from the Metro cameras had been deleted.” Basic, almost key.
“We couldn’t To know whether Ángel entered the station, whether he got off at Portugalete or where he got off, as everything indicates. Whether he is alone or whether he has met someone. We have asked for this since our first complaint, cameras please…”, laments Maite. ““We lost this important thing because they didn’t listen to us when we went to report.”
Another suspect
Searches, tips, opinions. The first months were a constant stream of data. “We listened so much, we learned so much… we didn’t know where to turn.” Maite, the rest of the family, shared every piece of information with investigators. “Yeah, we’ll see…they told us.” The investigation never progressed. A name, a suspect’s voice sounded strong. It didn’t go unnoticed by the police, but it didn’t go unnoticed by the family.
“We spoke to him directly and he said he would only tell us something about disappearing for money… if not, no.” He assures that they showed their evidence to the ertzainas responsible for the case. Screenshots of his blackmail. “They told us they didn’t think it had anything to do with it… But you know what? “He’s the same suspect, just in a different way, pointing us eight years into the future.” The two clues, the two statements they received after Ángel’s warning spread on social networks, encourage the cooperation of citizens and remind that for eight years the young man is not there.
The family gave these two clues to investigators. “They give them credibility; that’s one thing that matters above all else.” The last meeting was a few weeks ago. “They said they were going to start this thing… I just pray it comes true this time.”
He was twenty years old when he left home. He would be twenty-eight now. No matter how bad things were, he was always smiling. He lived through two turbulent years after his mother’s death, “met some quarrelsome people but achieved everything he did as a child, changed, rehabilitated himself and found inner peace when I adopted him.”
Enterprising, funny and very close to her family, “I know that something happened to her, that she is not alive, because all these years she would say things to me, call me… the truth is that hope is the last thing to be lost, I know that too,” says Maite.
“Ángel was a child, he had rights, he had rights, and we have rights too. The right to know what he is and what he is If someone has to pay for this, let them pay for what they did to him…“. He also has an army looking for him. And he has a family that does not stop screaming. “Justice, justice, justice.” The scream does not stop: “The angel has no voice, but we do.”