EP 79 | Missing: Reina Carolina Morales Rojas, East Boston, Mass with Marcela García (Boston Globe)

Reina Carolina Morales Rojas was last seen on Saturday, November 26, 2022 when she left her apartment in her East Boston neighborhood. She was seen getting into a vehicle that was headed to Somerville - reportedly to a friend's house. She is believed to have entered that building on Alston St. That is the extent of what we know. But we didn't know it until she was missing for 45 days. The Boston Police Department would eventually acknowledge their obvious negligence in notifying the public. There was no urgency. Critical time was lost. 

With insights from Marcela García, the first journalist to report on Reina's case, we navigate the emotional toll on Reina's family and the systemic shortcomings in media coverage and police responses that hinder the search for justice.

The initial lack of response to her case, both from the police and the media, is a factor in why it took time for her disappearance to gain wider notice. Reina Carolina had only been in the Boston area for a short time and did not speak English, which may have presented additional challenges in her disappearance. Another missing persons case in the region had taken up the air in the room. 

Marcela García, Associate Editor and columnist for The Boston Globe, covers a wide range of topics, from public education and immigration policy to social inequities and the Latinx community in Boston and beyond.

Marcela García
Boston Globe report on her visit to El Salvador: A heartbreaking visit to the hometown of a missing Boston woman

Women's Media Center

FBI

MMMPAC

Sources list at crimeofthetruestkind.com

Chapters

• 0:00 The Complexity of Missing Persons
• 10:34 Unsolved Missing Person Case
• 23:06 The Tragic Disappearance of Reina Carolina
• 36:17 Supporting Families of Missing Persons
• 42:51 The Persistence of Unsolved Cases
• 53:38 Crime Advocacy and Regional Stories

Transcript

Annngelle Wood: 0:00

Well, hello, my name is Anngelle Wood and this is Crime of the Truest Kind. In Massachusetts, there are currently 214 missing persons cases listed in NamUs, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. This is why I will continue to talk about families sharing their DNA with the hope that a missing loved one is found and can be connected to their family. This is about a missing woman named Reina Carolina Morales . She disappeared on Saturday, November 26, 2022. The public was not alerted to her disappearance. It wasn't until January 12, 2023, when the Boston police shared Reina Carolina's disappearance with the public. Nearly two months, 45 days, pretty late to find anyone who may have seen or heard something that could aid in the search for her. If you look at the Boston Police Department page about Reina, it says she went to Austin Street in Somerville. That's off Broadway. All other reports say Alston Street, which is behind McGrath Highway. For those of you familiar with the area, it is a distance of about a mile, but, more importantly, it's vital information to a missing person's investigation.

Annngelle Wood: 1:44

Reina Carolina Morales Rojas. Carolina, or Reina Carolina. She left El Salvador for Boston in May 2022, just a few months prior to her disappearance. She was 41, mother to two teenage children and looking for a better way. Undocumented, she came to the US alone with the dream of bringing her children here to live Marcela Garcia of the Boston Globe, who has been following Raina's story since first learning of her disappearance. Like the rest of us, she traveled to Santa Ana, a neighborhood once controlled by gangs and said to be one of the most dangerous areas in all of Santa Ana.

Annngelle Wood: 2:34

Reina reportedly paid a coyote, the term for a person or persons who get paid large sums of money to smuggle people across borders, namely the Mexico-US border. I read one account of a pollero slang for the person you ask to get you across to the United States. It's slang for people smuggler A coyote, according to this frontline report I read, coyotes run along the hills and the deserts. You don't call someone coming across in a car a coyote. Now, there are a number of ways to get someone across the border. Border agents take payoffs and when Americans got caught in the Piero game, nothing happened. So that's why American citizens are usually the ones doing the job. Oh, there's a whole lot of exploitation to go around and it's always far more complex, and it is always far more complex than anyone is going to tell you on the news or in a stump speech. The cost $10,000. A debt Reina reportedly repaid within a few months of arriving in the States. I don't know how quickly you could save up $10,000. It might take more than a few months.

Annngelle Wood: 3:51

She met someone who was subletting a room in a basement apartment on Bennington Street in East Boston Rent $1,200, according to the Boston Globe. I looked at rentals in Eastie and some of those new developments are ridiculous. But gentrification is another story. For another time Raina worked hard two and three jobs. She had to pay that coyote debt. She often worked overtime preparing meals for airlines at a catering company near Logan Airport. Her roommate, francisco Magana, who Marcella spoke to for her reporting, said that sometimes Raina would go see her boyfriend but she would always come back home. Raina told him she was going out that night but did not say where or who she would be seeing.

Annngelle Wood: 4:37

We would later learn that Raina was seen on security camera footage leaving her apartment. The little we do know about her disappearance is that she was seen getting into a silver vehicle on Bennington Street in East Boston with the destination of Alston Street in Somerville A ride share I don't know which company and I don't know if the driver was located and ever questioned. It was Thanksgiving weekend, located and ever questioned. It was Thanksgiving weekend, saturday, november 26, 2022. Always a quieter time in and around the city as students are often cleared out for the holiday break. She reportedly did make it to Somerville and went inside that apartment. It's a definite triple-decker area. Reina was wearing dark-colored on sandals, leggings, a dark colored shirt, a gray zip front hoodie, knit hat and was carrying a black backpack. She was carrying at least two cell phones, both of which were turned off right after midnight on November 27, 2022. And that's where it ends.

Annngelle Wood: 5:49

Raina is reported missing on Monday, november 28, two days after she was last seen and after she spoke with her family. She always spoke to her family, especially her two children, justin, who was 14 at the time, and Kimberling 16. It took the Boston Police Department 45 days to share the news of her disappearance. In an interview with PBS NewsHour, boston Police Deputy Superintendent Victor Evans was asked about it and called it a misstep. That happened. He said the police department owns it and it shouldn't have happened. He also admitted that it is not standard protocol for an alert to go out for a missing person six weeks after they have been reported.

Annngelle Wood: 6:43

At the time of this public announcement, the local news was giving minute-by-minute reports of the missing mother from Cohasset named Ana Walsh, herself a Serbian immigrant who made a career in commercial real estate. She did deserve that kind of urgency and, as we have learned, her husband is charged with her murder and for discarding her remains. He is in jail, with the trial to begin later this year. Raina had immigrated from El Salvador hoping to provide more support for her two children back home. After not responding to any calls or messages, Reina's sister Alicia contacted her landlord or messages. Reina's sister Alicia contacted her landlord, who filed a report with the Boston Police Department on November 28,.

Annngelle Wood: 7:29

Two days after she was seen, Women's Media Center reported on her disappearance and the lack of attention on her case. The piece dated June 22, 2024, which is my birthday, and written by Mariana Martinez Barba. She writes Reina is one of the thousands of Latinas who go missing every year, his situation made all the more dangerous by police and news media often failing to respond with the urgency needed. The first 24 to 48 hours are critical in terms of finding a missing person. People can respond if they did in fact see something, but if time flies, memories get blurred and people forget about things. That's according to Carol Liebler, a communications professor at Syracuse University Syracuse, you mean Syracuse. Her research focuses on how the media treats cases of missing women. When a white woman in her 40s goes missing in Massachusetts, there are at least 23 stories published. For Latinas or women of color, this is just eight stories. This is according to a comparative tool called RU Pressworthy, developed by the Columbia Journalism Review.

Annngelle Wood: 8:50

The late journalist Gwen Ifill coined the term Missing Woman Syndrome to describe the news media's focus on missing white women and dismissal of black and brown women who have disappeared. We saw it with the Gabby Petito case, a young woman who disappeared and was eventually located with help from web sleuths, almost detectives and YouTubies. But let me be clear. I believe that all missing people deserve to be searched for White, blonde women, salvadoran immigrants, drug abusers, runaways, people struggling with mental health issues and, yes, sex workers. As an advocate, I advocate for all people, not just those who look like me or sound like me.

Annngelle Wood: 9:38

I talk about all of these things with my guest, marcela Garcia, boston Globe columnist, who, in August 2023, traveled to El Salvador and wrote about her journey to Reina's hometown and where her family still lives. It is one of the largest cities in El Salvador. It was run by gangs and had been crime-ridden as a result. I don't know what came first, the crime or the gangs, but the poverty is obvious Run down makeshift homes and discarded junk line the dirt roads. Marcela Garcia has written a few pieces about Reina Carolina. On that trip she took to El Salvador, she met and spoke with Reina's family. It was, as you would imagine, incredibly emotional. We talk about that experience and what she learned about Reina Carolina and her life.

Annngelle Wood: 10:34

In June of 2024, she wrote about her two teenage children being eligible for what's called a U visa. This visa provides humanitarian relief while helping police and other authorities investigate and prosecute crimes. Domestic violence, human trafficking, involuntary servitude there is a long list of qualifiers. Abduction tops the list. The U visa is a non-immigrant legal status for people who have been victims of certain crimes. Its purpose is to allow victims without lawful status to report crimes to law enforcement without fear of reprisal, such as deportation. What the status is? Well, we'll try to find out. Coming up. I talk to Marcela Garcia Please support crime of the truest kinds, and there are a number of ways that you can do that.

Annngelle Wood: 11:28

You can listen to the show. You can tell your friends about it. You can share it on social media. You can drop it in the Facebook groups that you post in or on Reddit. You can leave a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts. You can come to a live show Next live show Thursday, march 13th Off Cabot in Beverly, massachusetts. You can drop a tip in the jar. You will be giving the dogs a bone and you will help send me to AdvocacyCon, which happens at the end of March in Indianapolis. There's Patreon Four tiers starting at just one dollar. Thank you, superstar. Ep Lisa McColgan. Information at crimeofthetruestkindcom. Thank you, I appreciate your time. I appreciate the coverage and attention that you have given to this case. I don't see a lot about her case or people like her, so it's really important for me to talk about this and speak to someone like you, marcella, who traveled to her hometown to talk to her family. Hometown to talk to her family. We need more of that. I totally agree.

Marcela Garcia: 12:50

Tell me how that trip came to be for you.

Marcela Garcia: 12:51

Well, first of all, I appreciate your attention to this case because the more time passes for me it's harder to find new, fresh angles. To write about this as a news. As a columnist, I always have to sort of find a new angle. I can't always just be saying day number or whatever of or missing I wish I could, but the realities of this news business is, and there's competing topics that it's always hard to like. But, trust me, that case lives in the back of my head like it's. It's just has stayed with me for these two years.

Marcela Garcia: 13:26

In fact, just this week marked the two-year anniversary of the first time I wrote about it. She went missing in november of 2022 and then I wrote about her disappearance. I was the first one in the sort of quote unquote mainstream media to write about that, to bring it to light in January of 2023. This week I was just thinking about that that it's been two years since I first wrote about her disappearance. The trip came to be. I obviously try to write that year, that first year in 2023, I tried to write as much as I could. But as I've written about this topic before in the context of these cases I've written. Or, as I said before, it's just never been so clear to me that us, in the news media, we take most of our cues from the police, and so if the police find something, the police publishes something. If the police does an update, that's what the media follows. And so it was sort of up to me to come up with like, okay now, what are we going to? What do I want to say about this? How can I keep this alive?

Marcela Garcia: 14:41

And so my editor actually was the one who pushed me to go. In all fairness and honesty, he was like, why don't you just go? Because I was very sort of intent of telling the story of who she is as a person, how she decided to come in, and I realized to come here. I realized that I couldn't tell that story without actually going to that place, to her hometown, to her home country, because she has no family here. She still has no family here, and so it's not like I could interview her daughter or her son here, her sister. They were all there and, mind you, I had been in touch with them via WhatsApp, via phone, in constant communication, but it's very different when you're there face to face, and so my editor was the one who gave me the green light and pushed me to go. And when he, when he brought it up, I was like, absolutely I'm going to go and and I try to go earlier that year than when I went.

Marcela Garcia: 15:43

But and I've actually never talked about this before, but at the time I think again it was I went in August of that year. I tried to go a couple months before, but I couldn't find it enough. I had some contacts, some people in the news media that worked in El Salvador, but El Salvador is a very unstable country, if you will, and at that time there was some violence and I was sort of advised not to go, and so I waited and then finally the opportunity came up to go in August, and so it was. It was eyeopening in many ways. It was very obviously emotional. I didn't think I was going to be so affected personally, to be honest, but I was the first time that I visited the family. When I met the mom, oh my God, I had to go to the bathroom to cry. So it's a very harrowing case and to this day we don't know what happened. We don't know, nobody knows what happened to her.

Annngelle Wood: 16:45

Thankfully for your reporting. In the little bit that we've learned from the Boston Police Department, the little that we know is that she took a car, I believe a ride share service from East. Boston to somewhere in Somerville to visit a friend.

Marcela Garcia: 17:02

Yeah.

Annngelle Wood: 17:02

And no one saw her ever again after she got out of that car.

Marcela Garcia: 17:08

Correct, that's the official word. To this day, I have not found anybody else who has seen anything. That was the last time she, or you know, going into that place was the last time she was seen, I believe and I again I'm not 100% sure but I believe she was seen going in but not out when she was dropped off. The central aspect of this case to me is that there was a big gap between she was reported missing and the time the police publicized her disappearance. That doesn't mean that the police wasn't doing anything to locate her, but we don't know what they did or what they didn't do, what they have said, which is very rare. They have admitted. They have said we should have publicized her disappearance earlier.

Annngelle Wood: 18:00

Yeah, because we know how this goes. We know that those first 24, 48 hours are so critical in any case like this Exactly. There's so many things that bother me about this case, Marcella, in large part that she has no family or friends here. She has nobody here in the US to advocate for her.

Marcela Garcia: 18:22

Right.

Annngelle Wood: 18:22

I probably can't articulate it, because it angers me that there's this young woman who is new to the US. She's been here for all of six months, she's working very hard and she disappears off the face of the earth and there's no concern.

Marcela Garcia: 18:39

You hit the nail on the head. Those 24 hours, 48 hours after disappearance are critical, because someone could have been on the lookout, someone could have been oh, wait a minute, that's the woman that you know the area. Right, people who live in Somerville would have been alerted to the fact that there was a woman missing, and that could have made the whole difference. Instead, more than a month passed before the police said, hey, there's a woman missing. And I think about this all the time. What you just said. What if there had been the mother, the sister, the daughter here banging on the police doors every day? Right, instead, it was the sister who left her on devices. She was just calling on the phone the police department. That just doesn't amount to. They should have paid attention to her period, end of story. But we know that, sadly, it shouldn't take more than that, but it does, it definitely does.

Annngelle Wood: 19:39

Were you able to locate anybody here in East Boston where she was living at the time.

Marcela Garcia: 19:45

I did talk to an interview, basically her roommate, one of the two people who reported her missing, this older man who, basically Reina Carolina, was renting a room from him and he was very surprised when he didn't show up the next day. He was in contact with Reina Carolina's sister and he went to report her missing to the police station. That following day, the Monday, he disappeared. Everything happened on a Saturday night the Saturday night after Thanksgiving 2022. And Monday he was reported missing. There was a police report filed and then nothing happened Again.

Marcela Garcia: 20:25

It's just hard to pinpoint exactly what wasn't being done if the police wasn't even thinking of posting a flyer with missing woman, right. And so to me, the heart of that case is that whole month and change that happened. Mind you, angel, that time here in Massachusetts, our news coverage and what I mean, our news coverage, I mean the whole state was consumed by news of another woman's disappearance. I know exactly who you're talking, yes, and so this case completely took over the news. It made even national news, right, this woman in a wealthier part of the state was missing, and it ended up being that her husband was charged with her murder, and this is a guy. I think he's in custody or something. I don't know, maybe he's out of bail, I don't actually know.

Marcela Garcia: 21:22

He's in custody, he'll go to trial.

Annngelle Wood: 21:25

I don't know if they've set a trial date, but it should be in 2020.

Marcela Garcia: 21:29

But the way this case consumed everything. It was everything people were talking about, because this woman's disappearance happened over New Year's, I believe. And so meanwhile there was this woman from East Boston, an immigrant, who had been missing since Thanksgiving, and not only the media didn't know, like you know what it was paying attention to this. There was this family in Instadter who was like screaming and clamoring. I mean, when you think about the frustration, the pain, the sheer frustration of of being so like far away, and your loved one like I, you and her sister couldn't get on a plane because she didn't have a visa and so otherwise she would have been here. So it was just one thing after another that sort of prevented this case from progressing Right and possibly even incompetent. You know like this is. This is very real.

Annngelle Wood: 22:29

So when you went to your hometown. What did you learn? Tell me about her. She has two children.

Marcela Garcia: 22:35

Yes, she has two children a young daughter who must be like 16 or 17 by now, and a younger son. I mean, what I learned was I wanted to learn everything about her, who she was as a person. You know, what did she like? What did she do? Like her previous jobs? Her friends and the family was very generous in that they opened their home to me, but they also called all of Carolina's friends Like I. I spoke to a couple of of her friends, a former boss of her.

Marcela Garcia: 23:06

She was someone who worked in law enforcement. It's it was a municipal I mean this is another irony of the case where she worked in law enforcement in her home country. There's no real analog to what that police force is here's kind of like a municipal, very sort of low key law enforcement force. It's just, it doesn't, you know, it doesn't have a lot of powers.

Marcela Garcia: 23:29

But think about, I mean, the way it was described to me was like a sort of glorified, you know, security guard body, right, that that guarded public places like stadiums and parks and that, and she, she would ride in a little motorbike and she loved having her motorbike, little motorbike, and she loved having her motorbike and you know, she was a very, very happy person with an incredible sense of humor and charisma, like this was something that struck me as really, really powerful, that she had this joy to live, like she just had, you know, just the grace that she was a happy person.

Marcela Garcia: 24:06

She was the one always bringing the party to everywhere, right, everyone she went, she brought the party with her I think that's how someone said it Like she would be up for anything any day. Like I spoke to her, to her neighbors and the neighbors were like you know, she was the one who would be like, let's have a barbecue today and a random Thursday, right, and then she would just put everything together and we'd be telling jokes. The other thing that struck me about her family is that the sister and the mom they're very religious and Reina Carolina was always very. She kind of wanted to be religious, but on her own terms, if that makes any sense.

Annngelle Wood: 24:47

Spirituality over religion.

Marcela Garcia: 24:48

Yes, and so she would be like very funny about the way her family, the way they would be religious, you know, going to church all the time and dressing a certain way, and Reina Carolina would be like, no, I don't want to dress that way, like I want to do my own thing.

Marcela Garcia: 25:07

She has an amazing style. Yes, right, you can tell that from the photograph that she was someone who paid attention to her, you know, to the way she presented herself, right, and the way she presents to the world. And so, knowing that about her, it wasn't perhaps a surprise that she would decide one day to come here, because she really wanted, she really had dreams. She had, you know, wants and dreams for her children. She wanted to give them a real life and a real shot at life. She wanted them to go to college, she wanted, you know, to have a home, she wanted to build a home for them, et cetera. So she decided to come here to have better economic opportunities. And then, the thing that I did find out when I was there, I mean all this, this picture of who she was, starts to fill in, right, like all the colors, all the nuances, all the shades that you know they, they started to come into focus for me when I started talking to everyone because, remember, I told you that I met a former boss of her. He told me that and again, this is secondhand, right, I couldn't entirely confirm it, but the boss told me that at the time when, when Reina Carolina decides to come to the U? S, he was having some issues with a couple of colleagues at work in this sort of law enforcement body that she was working for. She had had a couple of incidents where two different men had sort of harassed her, you know, basically escalated sexual harassment, and so that also played into her decision to leave. And it was very delicate the way she put it to me because she told me not in front of everybody, like she told me separately, like I think Reina Carolina was dealing with this and she and I were in touch even after she left, and she told me all this that you know she tried to also denounce these people and he went nowhere. And so it's all these things, these multifaceted things, that a person who decides to immigrate, to leave their home country, faces. And sometimes, when we think of immigrants and why they leave, we just sort of see one dimension oh, she wanted to have a better job or she wanted to make more money, when in reality it's a combination, it's sort of a constellation of things in someone's environment that you know pushes you basically to leave. And so that's one aspect, or one more dimension that I learned about her.

Marcela Garcia: 27:41

It was so sad to talk to the children. I mean, imagine having your mother, you know, taking away like that, and the not knowing too I wrote about this a couple of times just the not knowing, because you can find closure. I mean, obviously you never really recover from such a terrible loss, right? Your mother, your sister, you just need kind of some closure. What happened to her? Where's her body? Can we have a funeral? Can we say goodbye to her? Where's her body? Can we have a funeral? Can we say goodbye to her? So that was very tough.

Annngelle Wood: 28:11

There's so many things that come from this. You know she's in the US for six months. She goes missing. I imagine there's a lot of anger and disappointment and a lot of negative feelings that her family's going to have about the US. Now this is something that should not be swept under the rug. This is something that should not be forgotten about. We shouldn't shrug this off as oh well, just somebody from somewhere else that didn't know what she was doing. I don't feel that way at all and unfortunately, I think there's a fair amount of people who want to look the other way about these things. And you know, you have these two children who are getting closer to adulthood and their mother's no longer here. I always try to hold out for that, for missing people. She could be somewhere. We can use every scenario.

Annngelle Wood: 28:59

She lost her memory, she's been taken by someone, she's a litany of things, right, yeah, so these are the things that I don't want to stop talking about, because she could be here, she could be somewhere she doesn't know the US. I don't know how well she could speak English, how well she could communicate Right Even back home, if she left home the last straw at home in her workplace was.

Annngelle Wood: 29:29

She's being harassed on all sides and she has no protections. Well, maybe that was a deciding factor for her to eventually make that decision to come here and give it a go in the US. There's some information and I want to be very mindful of your time and I appreciate you spending time with me. There's some information that I would respectfully ask for you to pass on to her family. When dealing with these kinds of situations, unclaimed and unresolved, I would ask, however it works for her family and I don't know.

Annngelle Wood: 30:00

I'd even be willing to to help them with this, but share their DNA and put it in the U S database database in the event that Reina Carolina is found somewhere in some way.

Marcela Garcia: 30:13

I need to double check this, but I believe the Middlesex District Attorney's Office was working on that with them, because the good thing about Reina Carolina's case is that it also has attracted the attention of several local immigrant advocates and there's a group, a legal health group, that is working with the family to get the son and the daughter basically what are called the U visa, the category visa. Yeah, so they are working on that. In that process. I think they also were talking about the DNA, but that's actually a really good point and I will ask them because I remember there was talk about that at the time and so I just need to follow up with them on that, because that's a really good point. It is critical, obviously, you know, with DNA, the technology, it will be easy to.

Marcela Garcia: 31:09

I mean, again, if that were the case, right, I totally agree that that the hope, and, because her family is very religious, I think that they, they really, they really try to hold on, to hope that she is somewhere, that that she will be found, uh, eventually.

Marcela Garcia: 31:29

And I I'm not necessarily uh, I I guess by nature I'm much more cynical and and I I think about all the time what, what could have happened to her where could she be? And I and I go back and forth. Maybe she's being held, maybe she, you know, she was hurt, maybe this and that. But it's true, like even even over there, talking to the family and friends, what you were saying earlier about their, their view of the united states, they, they were saying, like this is the type of thing that happens in this country, not in the us, like they have a very sort of glorified, idealized version of the united states. You know, we are, you know the country, right, like we, we are a world power and and for an immigrant like reina carolina to go missing, it for for our police forces not to be able to find her after all this time, it just sends a very depressing message to her family and friends, right?

Annngelle Wood: 32:31

I worry for our immigrant population, for a lot of people who don't look like me, my entry into advocacy is only going to accelerate in the new year ahead, and I can only imagine how truly scary it is for people who didn't grow up the way they did.

Marcela Garcia: 32:48

The fear, the panic, the intimidation among you can just feel it in immigrant communities. I'm right now working on something to that effect. It's just very, very sad. I don't know if you heard or saw, but there was another woman missing in East Boston in December, an older woman. I guess she was considered a senior, and you know how when a senior person is missing or an elderly person is missing or someone with a form of disability or who may be exhibiting signs of dementia or Alzheimer's, you know that triggers sort of a different response depending on the police department. And so she went missing and her family was looking for her.

Marcela Garcia: 33:34

I wrote a column about it because I also felt, angel, that he was just not being given the same sort of attention that he should in terms of the media, in terms of the media, and unfortunately her body was found under a bridge in Chelsea and East Boston. It was so sad because this woman, elba Portillo, it appeared that she was exhibiting early signs of dementia and it appeared that the police was doing you know what they were supposed to be doing, but I also didn't get the sense from her family that they were happy. I mean to be fair, but I also didn't get the sense from her family that they were happy. I mean to be fair to the police, angela, and I think I want to. I always want to be fair to all parties, right, or stakeholders.

Marcela Garcia: 34:17

I guess no loved one of a missing person is ever going to be happy, I guess, with the police response, or they're never going to feel that it's enough. Like you just want to deploy every single like law enforcement agent. Right, like that's, that's something to be said, right, like I get it. But at the same time, the family of this woman rest in peace. The daughter was saying to me. You know, it just felt like they were asking me the same questions all over again. It just felt like they were not looking where they were supposed to be looking at, and so, and I felt that, like I felt I was like I cannot believe this again, right, and so again, the case ended up being, you know, a very tragic one because of the outcome, but still it's just so frustrating.

Annngelle Wood: 35:03

There's that missing piece, that sense of urgency that we don't see. There's not a balance of urgency. We've seen it in so many cases. We can go back to something that's probably fresher on people's memory. When Gabby Petito went missing, the internet exploded and, to her family's credit, they recognize that and, to her family's credit, they are working to advocate for women of color, for people in marginalized communities, because they saw exactly what happened. Gabby Petito was the only person, the only woman in the world, who went missing at that time and it's like look people, there's so much else going on. Please share some of this energy into finding some of these other people and giving some of these other people some attention.

Annngelle Wood: 35:51

Here in Massachusetts, where I live, I have teamed up with some other advocates like myself. We have established a coalition for families of missing and murdered loved ones. For families like this, because I speak to families, you know. An example of that is this young woman named Charlene Roseman, who's from Everett. She she disappeared. This is going back a number of years. She disappeared. Police weren't very helpful saying things like oh, she's an adult, she'll be back. No, her family knows her. They were absolutely worried because she didn't come home. This was a very responsible young woman, 23, going out to look for a car. I said all that to say that her family was lost. They didn't get any kind of support. What family knows what to do when their loved one goes missing?

Marcela Garcia: 36:37

Right.

Annngelle Wood: 36:38

Nobody does. There's no playbook.

Marcela Garcia: 36:40

Everyone is new to that role and you're so vulnerable as a family member and this is the part that always kills me, angel that family knows best. Right, like, people are always saying, no, this is not what she would do, and police tend to dismiss those feelings, as you know, like, why wouldn't you listen to the people who know the missing one best? They would know, right Like, this isn't the behavior that is typical, it's just mind blowing. And again, I'm not training these procedures or anything, but to me that just seems very common sense, right, it's just common sense. What were the things that she was known for doing? If this isn't well, then you know, get to work.

Annngelle Wood: 37:25

Absolutely, and this is one of the many reasons why we're working. We have a my colleagues host have been hosting a missing person stay at the state house. Now that we've formed this we call it MPAC is the the, you know, sort of initialized version of it. We're working on reaching out to families and this is something that I'm going to information I'm going to pass on to you that I hope you can connect us with this immigrant community so we can work with them and include them in this work that we're trying to do.

Marcela Garcia: 37:58

Of course, of course, absolutely yeah, anything I can do, you know, to help because it's just. I feel like this is something that is going to keep happening in immigrant communities more now more than ever, need the help of you know, larger advocacy network need the support of larger advocacy networks when something like this happens.

Annngelle Wood: 38:21

I want them to have some kind of resources where they can reach out to someone and, even if it's you know, help making flyers and designing flyers and printing out flyers and helping people pass them out. I understand that. You know everybody has varying degrees of skill level in this, not everybody knows how to make a flyer.

Annngelle Wood: 38:41

Not everybody knows how to distribute a flyer. Correct Step one, basic Make sure that this missing person has been recorded by the local police. So there is a point of contact, as I've learned I'm still learning through this whole advocacy process. I worked in rock and roll radio for 20 years Mozilla, so you know this is new to me, but you know.

Annngelle Wood: 39:03

This is where my heart is. This is where I want to be now. I want to help. I want to be one of the helpers, right?

Annngelle Wood: 39:10

So there are these things that happen where no idea what to do. They have no idea where to go. They have no idea what to do, even if we could help soften that and point them in a direction to where you know they're not. Families aren't putting themselves in, and I learned this happened. Families say you know, my, my brother's missing. Here's my phone number, Call me. No, I want to protect families from people who are going to then call them and try to scam them. Well, I have, but you need to give me. You know these things happen and it sounds and I make this joke at not at the expense of any of these families or victims, but I make this joke. It's like. It's like primetime TV. You see it in, but this is real life. These people don't choose this. They don't want this and they're lost and they want somebody somewhere to help them. Just listen to them and say my loved one is missing. Who's listening to me?

Marcela Garcia: 40:07

Who's hearing?

Annngelle Wood: 40:08

me who might be able to help me or point me in a direction where I can try to get some help, because we know the police it taxpayers money.

Marcela Garcia: 40:18

I mean, this is it. That's that's the other thing that we tend to forget that we are the ones paying for that service. It's a basic function, right of society, and if you cannot trust that your police department is going to be there when you need them, you know who can you trust? It's depressing to think that that's the case and I struggle a lot because I do want to be fair, because there are good police departments, there are good police men. You know, in the aggregate, and, and taken together, all these cases paint a different picture, right like I mean what you were saying earlier about gabby petito.

Marcela Garcia: 40:53

I mean, the thing that I can never forget and I will never forget about that case is that while the whole country was looking for Gabby Petito and while all these other police departments were looking for her, other bodies were found of people missing that nobody was looking for. I mean, is that what we like? Are there bodies everywhere that people are not looking for? They're just forgotten? I mean it's insane that that's what this has come to. It blows my mind I wonder all the time what would have happened with Elena Carolina's case if the police had been paying attention or doing more diligent work earlier, faster, sooner.

Annngelle Wood: 41:32

Knocking on doors because we don't know where she went in some of them. We don't know where she was going. We don't know what she was doing. Was there a job she was going to? You know, I understand she had some cell phones. Who did she speak to Aside from her family? Who was she having communication with? Where was she working during her time here in the US? These are all questions that remain unanswered.

Marcela Garcia: 41:56

Yeah, no, it's a great injustice and, like I said, angela, I think about it all the time and I wish I'm always looking, like I said in the beginning, when you and I started talking I always think of, like what is a new angle, what is a fresh way or approach that I can write about this, to sort of remind people. This has also made impact on readers' minds, like, from time to time I get you know random reader emails saying whatever happened to this woman that you were writing about. It's very striking to me that people you know some people are paying attention. I know that some of them are paying attention and it's kind of heartwarming but also like, oh, it's tragic all around right that people have to wonder what happens to someone who went missing months ago, months and months and months ago, and so I'm always kind of looking for that and hopefully I'll make it work soon enough to be able to write about her again.

Marcela Garcia: 42:51

I don't need to have an update. I mean I'll obviously reach out to the police, but I've always wondered. I mean I don't know if this is something that you know, but, like in the context of Raina Carolina's case, I've always wondered when does when? Is the case considered cold by the police. Is there a certain sort of trustful that has to be met, or is there a certain time, deadline or period of time that has to happen? Does it vary by police department? Like I've always wondered, at what point does that become a full case?

Annngelle Wood: 43:21

Well, they'll tell you. Depending on the department and where they are, they'll tell you oh, we're still working leads, or there's no new information, but it's still an open case and obviously you know these are the answers they give you when you try to get any kind of information.

Marcela Garcia: 43:37

Absolutely, you try to get any case files or whatever they're like.

Annngelle Wood: 43:40

oh, it's a still open case.

Marcela Garcia: 43:43

We can't share anything.

Annngelle Wood: 43:43

It varies from police department to police department, from county to county, state to state. It depends on how much or how little work that they put into it versus, probably, how much of that they want to reveal to who's asking.

Marcela Garcia: 43:59

Yeah, exactly, to my understanding the last time I spoke with Alicia, probably how much of that they want to reveal to who's asking? Yeah, exactly Exactly. And to my understanding the last time I spoke with Alicia, carolina's sister, you know they do hear from time to time from the detective, from the main detective, but not to hear any meaningful update. It's just like to stay in touch and I guess, but it's mostly Alicia who initiates the contact and it's like very, very harsh and I don't believe that any meaningful information is ever given to her. And whenever she asks for very sort of pointed questions what happened to this? What about her this?

Marcela Garcia: 44:34

I feel like at some point there was a big question about what happened to her cell phone and somebody else's cell phone. Like apparently the person who she was meeting with that night was a former boyfriend of Carolina. Apparently that person was interviewed or questioned by the police. Alicia had questions about what about that person's cell phone and she never really could get a real answer from them. She also was in touch with Spanish speaker victims advocates from the middle sex DA's office but never really thought oh, this person is a suspect, or we believe this, this, this and this happened, or this is what we're pursuing. I always ask them can you give me a sense of how many people you question? Show me a measure of your investigation? But of course you know that's like asking the wall. They would never say. And, like you said, they always say oh, it's an open investigation, we can't comment, which of course it's nothing that prevents them from revealing any information. They just don't want to say anything or reveal anything.

Annngelle Wood: 45:37

Very likely they recognize that. Well, you said it. They could have notified the public even just in Somerville and East Boston. Yeah, and let them know. Be on the lookout. Missing woman. Here's what we believe she looks like now. We know that right now she's this size, this weight, and the most recent photograph, as I understand it, her hair was very long at the time long and dark at the time that wouldn't have cost them anything to just say that to the public.

Annngelle Wood: 46:06

But for whatever reason, they just made the decision that it wasn't important enough.

Marcela Garcia: 46:12

Yeah, to let anybody know Just blows my mind Like how does a case like that just sort of falls through the cracks? How does that happen? And what trust do I have, or what confidence do I have in the police that that's not going to happen or that it hasn't happened in other instances when I have an issue, when I am willing that's never going to happen. But what if I am the victim of a crime? Am I going to trust the police in that way? That just sends a very troubling message to the whole community, not just the immigrant community, is it? Does someone have to be white and wealthy and blonde to? Does a person's family have to be local for the police to do something? It's just so unfair and unjust. It's a grave injustice.

Annngelle Wood: 46:57

Right it is. And you know you have her family and her two children, which I read a bit about. The U visas and her family, or at least her children, who are nearing the age of adult. Yeah, I would imagine they would want to come here and see what kind of work that they may be able to do to find out information about their mom.

Marcela Garcia: 47:22

A hundred percent for sure. I mean, wouldn't you want to do that? I mean, it would be the only thing that I would think all the time, like I want to go there. And so, with the new administration and with all these things being threatened, like immigrant rights and just the whole immigration system being completely overhauled in a way that just makes it more exclusionary and restrictive, I just don't know what's going to happen. And so that was last year at some point when the U visa thing because there's several things that have to happen for a U visa to even be filed for, like you know, the law enforcement organization has to provide documentation that the person or the people the applicants have been victims of a crime, and that took a while to happen. And so I don't really know where the application stands at this point. But I was under the impression that those visas have long, long, long delays and there's just a huge backlog, just like the immigration system at large. So maybe it's a long shot, and more so at this point but we'll see.

Annngelle Wood: 48:26

Well, my heart goes out to them because they're just in this question mark that looms over them, Sadly. This is what her family is dealing with. This is what Marina Carolina's family is dealing with this question mark, this ambiguous loss. My mother disappeared. We have no idea what happened. Is she?

Marcela Garcia: 48:48

alive.

Annngelle Wood: 48:49

Did someone harm her? We don't know. My friends, julie, who has a missing sister her sister, mara, has been missing for 21 years.

Marcela Garcia: 48:59

Oh my God, it's haunting and that's a very poignant way of putting it An ambiguous loss. It's something I just don't want to wish on anybody. It's just how it becomes part of you. I can't even imagine what that must be like. My heart goes out to her too, and her family. I tried to reach Alicia earlier this week but we couldn't connect. I'll try it again. Maybe she'll give me something to write about. Maybe there's an update.

Annngelle Wood: 49:28

If you're able to learn as to whether there was any continued conversation with the family about sharing DNA and getting it into the database where law enforcement can access that. I mean the families have to sign on.

Marcela Garcia: 49:42

I see.

Annngelle Wood: 49:43

Right. For a period of time people were like I don't want to enter my DNA because the police can just go in and take it. That's not the case now. The laws are that you have to submit it to the databases where law enforcement is allowed to get at it. Yeah, we see it with. You know a number of cases. The Golden State Killer, who was finally captured many years ago, made big news because of the use of DNA and genetic genealogy. These are the kinds of things that are going to solve these cases, the scientific technology that's going to finally lead families to the answers that they have been longing for.

Marcela Garcia: 50:22

Hopefully, one can only wish. Thank you, angel, for giving time to this topic and to remind me to keep digging and to just try to keep it more out there. Thank you for giving this time, and I'll definitely share this with the family, even though they don't speak English.

Annngelle Wood: 50:39

I want them to know, I would want them to know that you are someone who's putting Reina Carolina's case on the spotlight Absolutely, and I will reach out to you with all of the information about how we're going forward with this advocacy coalition, because you are a very important connection to this community that we really want to have Anything I can do really want to have Anything I can do. Many thanks to Marcela Garcia of the Boston Globe for covering Raina's case. I continue to follow her case and will share any developments that come up, and I do hope there will be some. After missteps with the Boston Police Department notifying the public about Reina's disappearance, there have been some changes. The Boston Police Department updated its missing persons protocol In May of 2023, the Boston Police Department quietly revised the department's protocols around missing children and persons. This is, according to Marcela Garcia's reporting in the Boston Globe, a policy that was last updated in 1992. New regulations include, among other things, a redesigned missing persons form to collect more detailed information about that missing person, but there appears to be no mention of ethnicity, including whether they use a language other than English and, if so, which one. And an expanded public notification section that includes additional parties to coordinate decision-making around when to issue alerts.

Annngelle Wood: 52:17

Massachusetts Missing and Murdered Persons Advocacy Coalition. We are planning events in 2025. We will be at the Massachusetts State Police Unresolved Cases Unit and the Boston Police Department Cold Case Unit are hosting another Missing Persons Day, Saturday, March 1st in East Boston at the Girls and Boys Club, which is just around the corner from Bennington Street, the street that Reina Carolina was living on. And planned for the spring 2025, a Missing and Murdered Persons Day at the Statehouse in Boston. A Missing and Murdered Person's Day at the State House in Boston. I will be at AdvocacyCon in Indianapolis at the end of March. Live show Thursday, March 13th, Off Cabot in Beverly. Everything at CrimeOfTheTruestKindcom.

Annngelle Wood: 53:25

If you have information about any of these cases that I share with you, you can email me directly. You can reach out to the local police department. You can leave an anonymous tip. Thank you for listening. My name is Anngelle Wood.

Annngelle Wood: 53:38

This is Crime of the Truest Kind. Massachusetts and New England crime stories, regional history and always advocacy focused. If there is a case that you would like me to know about or information that you have learned about a case, send me an email Crimeofthetruestkind at gmailcom. I do read my dms on socials. I'm on just about every platform @ crime of the truest kind and do follow the show. Thank you to my hardcore supporters. I appreciate you a great deal and will be dropping a little appreciation gift in your mailbox. All right, I must be going. I know I say this at the end of every show and I mean it. I was listening to another podcast about a serial killer, about BTK it's actually quite good and he was almost obsessive about teaching his young daughter about safety, making sure the doors were always locked. Why? Because he was a predator and by all means lock your goddamn doors.