In 2024, Bexar County had one detective investigating nearly 600 missing persons cases. Some are years old, but new ones come in almost every day.
One of those cold cases is Pauline Cantu Diaz. It’s been 14 years since her family last saw her.
In San Antonio and Bexar County, there are at least nine people who are reported missing every single day. Who works on these hundreds of missing persons cases?
Missing in San Antonio is a multi-part reporting series by the San Antonio Report on people who go missing and the people who work to find them.
Read the first story that reveals just how many go missing.
Read the second story, in which we share the stories of eight local missing persons cases.
In the fourth story, we write about a possible solution that’s working in Houston to help keep track of older people with dementia.
Share your stories with us through this form.
Law enforcement agencies handle missing persons cases in different ways. Most of Texas’ largest metropolitan areas police department or sheriff’s offices have dedicated investigative units for missing persons but agencies without missing person units end up passing these cases on to detectives who work all kinds of cases from homicides to burglaries.
The Bexar County Sheriff’s Office Missing Persons Unit, established in 2017, has one detective — Richard Villa.
In October, BCSO told the San Antonio Report it was not adding detectives to its missing persons unit because there were no funds allocated for positions in the budget. Four months later and after the publication of a multi-part reporting series called Missing in San Antonio, those plans have changed.
Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar said his office is now interviewing candidates to hire at least two additional detectives to work in the missing persons unit. If hired, they would start by this summer. Salazar said he hopes to eventually have at least five detectives working in the missing persons unit.
“It’s important agencies do more than just put out to the public, ‘We’re looking for this child.’ To the public, all those flyers begin to look alike,” Salazar said.
One detective in the unit isn’t enough to respond to the hundreds of adults and children who are still missing each year, Salazar said.
“Unless a law enforcement agency is physically sending someone out into the field to look for that child, you’re not doing justice to the community,” Salazar said.
It is worth creating a public database that shows who is actively missing, he said. Often, there is no way for the public to know who is missing, unless they see it on social media or in the news.
When there aren’t dedicated detectives, information is overlooked
For Paula Diaz-Martinez, knowing there will be additional detectives investigating missing persons cases in Bexar County gives her a new sense of hope.
Her mother went missing on Dec. 7, 2010 after working a shift at the H-E-B on Goliad Road.
In September, nonprofits that work to help solve cases, Search and Support San Antonio and Season of Justice, sponsored a billboard in Floresville featuring Cantu Diaz’s case, which will stay up for a year.
Tips started coming in almost immediately, Diaz-Martinez said. She sent them to BCSO urging them to talk to tipsters before they decide not to speak at all.
“A whole month went by, there was nothing, and again we went back in October, there was nothing … It was several months that they neglected or he was just overwhelmed,” Diaz-Martinez said.
A recent meeting with the detective has reassured her family that the BCSO is working to solve her mother’s case, she said.
She believes the turning point in the investigation could lie within the evidence still in possession of the Wilson County Sheriff’s Office, including Cantu Diaz’s truck, which was found empty in Floresville near her estranged husband’s house after she went missing.
Diaz-Martinez recalled a tiny speck of blood being found and saved as DNA evidence.
Detectives told the family at the time it wasn’t animal blood, but the amount of evidence collected wasn’t enough to identify whose it was through tests at the time.
“I’m hoping they see things that were disregarded in the past. Things, clues, tips may have been disregarded and dismissed coming back to Bexar County from Wilson County Sheriff’s Office,” Diaz-Martinez said. “I’m hoping they can see something that was dismissed and could be the breaking point on this case.”
San Antonio’s missing persons unit has no detectives
The San Antonio Police Department’s Missing Persons Unit consists of 16 civilian agents who are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week to assist people reporting someone missing and taking in tips about missing persons and investigating them.
They do all their work from a downtown office, working the computers and the phones; making calls, investigating information online and on social media, and requesting assistance from police officers and detectives, when needed.
The agents check with local hospitals, coordinate with other law enforcement agencies to address leads in other cities, and are authorized to request search-and-rescue dogs.
Michelle Ramos, spokeswoman for the police department, said these agents call on homicide detectives to investigate foul play, if it is suspected.
SAPD Chief William McManus told the San Antonio Report that the department is not considering adding detectives to the missing persons unit.
“Many of these missing person reports are repeat runaways, so it’s not like every time somebody goes missing, there’s foul play involved,” he said after a public safety meeting at City Hall on Feb. 18.
The police chief is right. In 2024, three-quarters of people who were reported missing in San Antonio were children, or teens, based on data collected through open records requests. The vast majority of these juvenile cases are solved or closed quickly.
Nationally, less than 1% of missing persons cases reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children are abductions by strangers. But even runaways are at risk of being involved in or becoming victims of crime.
Retired SAPD homicide detective Mark Duke said the unit’s agents get training “but it’s nothing like what a detective would go through.”
The work the agents do is important, he says. There need to be people at a desk around the clock to document, request patrol, pass information to follow-up units, track down information in the online world and add missing persons to the National Crime Information Center and Texas Crime Investigation Center (NCIC/TCIC) databases quickly.
According to the city’s job description, San Antonio’s missing persons agents make $17.65 an hour and are NCIC certified to take reports, enter data, update databases and provide basic information, access police forms and enter the information of juveniles processed through the Juvenile Processing Office.
They also must identify factors related to Amber or Silver Alert cases, present information to other units when needed and assist external law enforcement agencies in locating missing persons in their jurisdictions. A high school diploma and two years’ experience in a position interacting with adolescents in an educational or criminal justice position is required.
Duke worked roughly 60 cases involving deaths per year for 13 years before leaving the city’s police department.
Having detectives is essential, Duke said, because when missing persons cases get passed onto homicide detectives, the case is added to their workload and may not be a priority, especially since murder cases may contain more evidence detectives can follow. And solving missing persons cases does not count toward a homicide detective’s clearance rate.
Having enough detectives to bring people home is important because every missing person should matter, said Annie Salcido, whose daughter has been missing for seven months now.
“To them, my daughter is just a Hispanic who is an addict,” she said.
Jeanie Chavez, who will be 33 in March, was last seen at her boyfriend’s home on San Antonio’s West Side in July. Her mother, a nurse in California, is raising Chavez’s two girls. They think of their mother every day.
On Wednesday, her 11-year-old daughter Leah Garcia held a small crystal in both of her hands, clinging to her grandmother. She said it’s her good luck charm gifted to her by her mother.
At the corner of West Summit and Aganier avenues, Salcido points out that at least three homes surrounding the property where Chavez went missing have video doorbells. But she says police told her that there’s no video footage evidence.
“Show us that Jeanie left, that’s it,” Salcido said, frustrated that there is no evidence or information from SAPD that proves that she is missing and did not willingly leave.
For Salcido, life has to continue, even though she’s not giving up on finding her daughter. She’s hired a private investigator because she says she’s heard little to no communication from police.
The private investigator discovered that the last person Chavez was with has several previous charges relating to family violence, including in Bexar County, and that this person is wanted in other states for more serious crimes.
Salcido believes her daughter is alive based on recent tips.
She hasn’t shared that information with SAPD’s missing persons unit because she’s not convinced they would follow up on the information.
There used to be two detectives in the SAPD missing persons unit between 2008 or 2009, Duke said.
“Even then it wasn’t enough,” he said. “There’s no substitution for manpower, or having enough people to do the job.”
It all comes down to allocating funds to hire detectives for the police department, and making sure missing persons cases get the attention they need, Duke said.
