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| Chavez, Estela 3-3-93; Avenal, CA | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Jun 13 2017, 09:44 AM (48 Views) | |
| tatertot | Jun 13 2017, 09:44 AM Post #1 |
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http://kmph.com/news/local/cold-case-avena...-plead-for-help Cold Case: Avenal mother missing 24 years, children plead for help by Liz GonzalezMonday, June 12th 2017 Estela Cortez was last seen in 1993. The mother of seven's husband said he left her at a hospital in Wasco. There is no hospital in Wasco. Nearly two dozen pictures covered a table in the Kings County Sheriff’s Office Wednesday afternoon. They show different times in Estela Cortez’s life. Her struggles as a single mother of four. A photo with a new love interest. And the fruit of that relationship: three children, including twins. “It brings up a lot of memories,” says Miguel Serrano. “It’s hard.” Serrano is Cortez’s son. He remembers his mother had a rocky relationship with her husband, Sergio Melendez Chavez. “They would close the door, you could hear my mom scream. Sometimes she would have black eyes,” he says. “We couldn't do anything, we were young.” He was only eight years old in 1993, when his mother vanished. Chavez had taken her to see a doctor, but he returned alone. "They mentioned a hospital in Wasco. At eight years old, you don't know. After growing up, you start knowing about areas, you look up and there's never been a hospital in Wasco," Serrano says. His oldest brother, Fernando, was 11 at the time. He says Chavez’s brother, Timoteo “Timo” Chavez had come from the Bay Area that day. He witnessed Chavez packing up some belongings and changing the tires on his car. Sergio Chavez told him his mother would later return, or someone would come to pick them up. Not long after, he watched them drive away. They had also taken Cortez’s three youngest children. “He didn’t care much about us because we weren’t his kids,” says Fernando, referring to himself and his three siblings. The youngest - his sister, Maribel-- was just four at the time. Fernando says the Chavez brothers gave him $100-$200 before taking off. “They told me to use it to buy food,” he says. Hours later, no one showed up. Days later, there was still no sign of their mother. “We were going to school, coming back home. We were eating with the money Sergio had left,” Miguel Serrano says. “One of my mom’s friends came by looking for my mom. We told her she went to the hospital last week. They ended up calling the police. It seemed weird. Everything seemed weird.” “It was listed as a missing person. The first time I looked at it, I knew it wasn’t a missing person. I knew it was worse than that. “It’s hard for me to think of Fernando, his brothers and sister,” says Rick Bradford, Detective Commander with the Kings County Sheriff’s Department. “There’s no hospital in Wasco. That’s odd.” He was first put on the case in 1997. He says that as new, major cases broke, he and other detectives couldn’t dedicate as much time and resources to cold cases like Cortez’s. “I always seemed to come back to it, whenever I got the chance,” Bradford says. Once Bradford was in charge of the detectives unit, he personally took on the case. He reached out to Cortez’s family on March 3rd of this year - 24 years to the day she was reported missing Detectives traced Chavez to the city of Celaya, in Guanajuato, Mexico. “We request state police in Mexico to contact him, which they do. They interview him. The report we get back from state police in Mexico is ‘He’s lying.’ They can’t do anything or prove anything. But we know he’s lying,” Bradford says. Detectives also reached out to Chavez’s brother, Timoteo, in Morgan Hill. “We know Timoteo knows something. His attorney contacted law enforcement and said ‘Stay away from my client.’ It’s frustrating. Very frustrating,” Bradford says. “He helped him with stuff and, I know he knows [what happened],” Miguel Serrano says. “He did his best to hide for 24 years, started his family and everything.” Bradford thinks Timoteo Chavez drove his brother and three children to the U.S.-Mexico border. Two of those children have since been re-united with their half siblings. “They’ve been told lies their whole lives. They were told they were born in Mexico and raised in Mexico and their mother never loved them and abandoned them,” Serrano said. “We want to find closure for us. This is hard. “My kids have no grandma to go to. My kids ask about my mom and I really don’t know what to tell my kids sometimes. There’s nowhere to go. There’s nowhere to take them to see her or anything.” His brother Fernando adds, “We needed her. We didn’t have her then, we’d love to have her now --at least her remains.” |
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8:02 PM Jul 10