“I met a friend for lunch in Portugalete at 3.30pm.” Those were among the final words he spoke before vanishing. “I don’t need money, just for the subway,” he said, and his friend offered to pay. His name was Ángel, and his family has spent eight years searching for him. He disappeared on October 6, 2015. Missing. No trace. “I gave him five euros for the metro, told him to be careful… and we never saw him again,” says his cousin and guardian, Maite. The last person to see him was another cousin: “He ran into Ángel near the Bolueta metro station, a route he used when he went to Portugalete.” The journey covers 18 stops and takes just over thirty minutes. Yet … “he didn’t come to dinner.”
During these eight years, the family has pursued every lead. “There were countless clues, comments and rumors.” Dozens of hypotheses exist, but none have produced a police conclusion. For the family, one explanation dominates: something happened to Ángel, and his disappearance was not voluntary. A suspect who has avoided charges continues to surface in memory. “Eight years later, two different people pointed us back to him.”
Alarm after a night out
“As soon as it happened at night, I knew something bad had occurred,” Maite says. This is the story told alongside CASO ABIERTO, the investigation portal that has tracked the case for years. “I planned to mingle a bit, stay a little later. Give me half an hour while I came…” he explains, “He often stayed at a friend’s place or spent the night out, but never without warning.” This time there was no warning.
The calls and messages came mainly from Portugalete, a community where Ángel had many friends and where he had lived since childhood. “He was with me since he was 16. His mother died when he was 14, and he faced hard times.” He had hit a low point, left Portugalete, and moved to the Otxarkoaga neighborhood in Bilbao with Maite’s family. “That day—the last day—he left home in a perfectly ordinary way. The meeting with friends was normal, nothing suspicious. He simply didn’t return and, above all, did not warn.”
The night wore on and Ángel did not return. He had never done this before. “We tried to contact his friends. I saved many numbers on my phone because I often called them,” Maite recalls. “No one saw him… no one knew anything.” The questions only intensified. “Something felt very off to us,” she explains. “Angel was not eating. Anxiety grew. We believed something had happened, and the next day we filed a missing-person report.”
Three reports
“Clothes: jeans, yellow T-shirt, green and yellow stripes, New Balance sneakers,” Maite described. “He had said he would go with some friends, but he never appeared.” Ertzaintza officers recorded the initial data, she notes. “We told them he had disappeared, that no one knew his whereabouts, that we were looking for him and searching for his friends.” In parallel, relatives continued to search in Portugalete. No one had seen him. Nothing pointed to a lead.
“Nervously, we returned to the Ertzaintza to see if there had been any progress and to ask for information.” The first surprise would come later. “We did not file any complaints… We filed a second complaint, but they did not want to accept it.” Maite and the other cousins felt the agency could not connect the dots. One officer allegedly told them, “You will enjoy your life.” The family continued to hunt while investigators pursued the facts in parallel.
“An agent arrived and said there was no missing-person report. We could not believe it, we had to report him a third time.”
“They fed us clues: ‘I saw him at Lonja de Portugalete, I saw him there…’ The family moved as a single force, chasing every lead. ‘During one search, an agent appeared and said that they could not investigate a single person… We told him Ángel was missing.’ The agent insisted there were no missing-person complaints. The family pressed on, filing a third report.
There is more than a two-week gap between the first and third complaints. By the time the case reached the Missing Persons Unit, metro-camera footage had been deleted—a basic, yet critical, setback.
“We could not determine whether Ángel entered the station, got off at Portugalete, or where exactly he went. Whether he met someone or he was alone. We had asked for cameras from the start,” Maite laments. “We lost this important piece because they did not listen when we reported.”
Another suspect
Searches, tips, opinions—early months were a flood of information. Maite and the family shared every detail with investigators. “We listened, we learned, and we kept moving,” she says. The investigation never progressed. A name, a suspect, kept returning. It did not escape the attention of the police, nor of the family.
“We spoke to him directly and he claimed he would release details about the disappearance only if money was involved — otherwise, nothing.” He claimed to have information that could link him to the case, which the family showed to the officers handling the case. Screenshots of alleged blackmail were shared, yet investigators suggested it did not seem connected. The family still believes the same suspect resurfaced in new context years later. The two clues and two statements received after Ángel’s warning spread on social networks continue to push citizen cooperation and remind everyone that Ángel remains missing eight years on.
The family presented these two clues to investigators, hoping they would gain credibility. “That’s what matters most,” Maite notes. A recent contact suggested another lead; the last meeting with authorities occurred a few weeks prior. “They said they would restart the investigation. I hope this time it becomes a reality.”
He was twenty years old when he left home. He would be twenty-eight now. Despite the hardship, he kept his smile. His life included two turbulent years after his mother’s death, a circle of difficult friends, and a path to personal growth that his relatives believed he had earned and deserved. They describe him as enterprising, funny, and deeply connected to family. The family holds onto hope that something happened and that truth will surface. They recall his resilience and the efforts to safeguard his memory.
Maite emphasizes that Ángel had rights and deserves to be known. The family insists on accountability for what happened. The cry remains loud: justice for Ángel, justice for his family. The search continues, and so does their resolve to be voices for the missing. The angel may be silent, but they will not be silenced.