A father’s tireless search for his son has ended in Tijuana, 5 1/2 years later.
“We did it. Erick Carrillo has been located,” Eddy Carrillo said Friday. “It’s not the way we want it, we wanted him to be alive, but only God knows.”
His son’s remains were found last month by the search collective he founded in a lot in the El Lago neighborhood of Tijuana, about 5 miles from where he was last seen on June 1, 2019.
On Friday, the Baja California Attorney General’s Office gave the DNA confirmation needed to finally give closure.
The cause of death has not yet been determined, prosecutor Fidel Corvera said.
While the pursuit is over for the Carrillo family, thousands of families in Mexico continue their painful search for lost loved ones, mostly with their own resources.
There are nearly 100,000 reports of missing persons in Mexico, federal officials said in March. They are known as Mexico’s “disappeared.”
Eddy Carrillo founded the Todos Somos Erick Carrillo collective after his 20-year-old son, a Los Angeles resident, disappeared after leaving a bar in Tijuana’s El Dorado neighborhood with a friend. The young man had been in Tijuana visiting his mother. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department issued a missing person alert in 2019.
The father moved from San Diego to Tijuana to dedicate himself fully to the search.
“Prohibido rendirse,” or “It is forbidden to surrender,” reads the Facebook page of the collective. Since 2019, the collective has helped find 1,650 missing persons, both alive and deceased, according to Carrillo.
Carrillo said the group had previously searched the property where his son’s remains were found. They had found about 20 bodies in the area. Last month, the group returned and found two more human remains.
“This is the first time I’ve said it. I feel it is Erick,” Carrillo said Tuesday before learning the official DNA results. First, the testing on one of the two remains came back positive for his son’s friend, Francisco Ivan, and then the jacket Erick was wearing when he was last seen was found.
On Friday morning, Carrillo went live on Facebook to share the moment when authorities told him the results were positive. “This is a day I’ve been waiting for,” he told reporters as he left. “It was a very hard-fought battle.”
Carrillo said he hopes to have his son’s funeral in the next week. He also said he will meet again with prosecutors to seek justice and find out the truth about what happened to his son.
Erick Carrillo’s case is one of the most “emblematic” in Baja California, said Angélica Ramírez, founder of the search collective Una Nación Buscando T.
She founded the group in 2016 when her friend, Jazmín Gopar, and her baby girl disappeared. Her friend’s remains were found months after, while the baby girl was found alive the next year. Nevertheless, she continued with the group to help all the families who had supported her.
Ramírez said she spoke this week with some families still searching for their loved ones, and they all shared how Erick’s case gives them hope. She estimated that there are about 30 search collectives in Baja California, half of them in Tijuana.
“It gives the families strength to keep searching,” she said. “They saw this example of Carrillo going out to search every day.”
José María Ramos, professor and researcher at the Colegio de la Frontera Norte, noted that the number of missing people located is low. It is not considered a public priority, and collectives struggle to get enough resources to continue the searches on their own, he said.
“Ideally, this should be a priority issue, and there should be cooperation between citizens and government, and in some cases from international organizations, especially given the importance of criminal activity in the region,” he said.
Mexican nonprofit Citizen’s Council for Public Safety ranked Tijuana as one of the most violent cities in Mexico in 2023. From January to October this year, there were 1,533 homicides in Tijuana, according to state data.
Carrillo said Friday he will keep his promise and retire from the group he founded now that his search is over. But he added that he will continue to help other families for some time to come.
On Friday afternoon, hours after the news conference, Carrillo joined other families, equipped with shovels and picks, for another day of searching in Tijuana.
