“When are you coming, Lolo?” Remedios asked her son when she told him about her plan. “As soon as I cross the bridge, Mom.” He had planned to pass the Bridge of All Saints in Malaga.
He kept in his black bag clothes for two or three days. “His jeans, his shirts, a toiletry bag…” her mother recalls. “Have a good time.” Before leaving her house, in Alcalá de Guadaira (Seville), she kissed him: “he was very kissy,” adds the woman. “I’m coming Tuesday, mom.”
Remedios lost her son that Tuesday, November 3, 2009. Manuel Ríos Cruz, Lolo, was 25 years old, with work, plans, and challenges. He never liked the water too much, his hobby was not sailing, but that day he called from the sea: “We’re adrift, mom. Take aim, please, don’t let us die.” Remedios wrote down, as best she could, the coordinates. They delivered the data to Salvamento Marítimo. They didn’t come, Lolo He disappeared.
Presumed, flirtatious and good-natured
He took care of himself, drank protein shakes, went to the gym… “but without obsession.” He was conceited, “always with his wax in his hair”, flirtatious and good-natured, “he cared about everyone”. He joined his family, his mother, whom he adored: “mom, don’t die, I’m going…”, with a strong connection with his sister, Raquel, and ‘tito’ favorite of the four nephews of hers.
“Mom I’m going to stay here to eat, mom I’m not going tonight& mldr; she told me everything,” recalls Remedios. He left home on a Sunday, on Tuesday there was no news, something was wrong.
“I woke up that Tuesday very upset,” his mother recalls. “Something has happened,” she told her husband, Manuel. He reassured her: “you always think about bad things, woman“. It didn’t get better. “I’m calling the boy and he doesn’t give me a call.” At 7:00 p.m. the call came.
The Call: Horror on a Bus
“I have my son’s screams recorded and they will never go away.” It’s been 12 years, but he remembers it as if it just happened. The phone rang. On the screen, the number of your child’s friend. Remedios picked up: “Listen to me Reme, he told me very nervous.” She was on a bus: “take a pencil and paper and write down, but quickly, quickly“, he remembers. “I said to him: but Juan, what happens? He answered: listen to me, but quickly, we are in danger, that we are very bad, that we are adrift”.
Adrift? Nerve and confusion. “I didn’t know they were in the sea,” says Remedios. It was not something usual in Lolo. He didn’t enjoy being in the water, “going deep gave him anxiety.” Remedios called for help and a girl, who was sitting next to her on the bus, started pointing. Numbers, letters, dictated with nerves. “I said things that I didn’t know what they were. I only knew how to say: And Lolo? Where is my son?”
“lol picked up the phoneRemedios recalls. “She started screaming: ‘Mom, run, ask for help, we’re in danger, I’m very sick, please, please mom, don’t let me die in the sea“.
Then the call was cut off. With the coordinates written down, Remedios got off the bus. “He told me that ask Salvamento Marítimo for help“. A man who heard Remedios screaming in the street was the one who called. The search was activated. Horror set in.
A bag of dry clothes
“Hello, I’m calling to find out how the search for my brother is going,” Raquel asked over and over again on the phone. That night, in the house of the young Sevillian, nobody rested. “My daughter was trying to talk to Salvamento Marítimo. I, who couldn’t even speak, I took a rucksack thinking that they were going to rescue. So I took two tracksuits, one for him and one for his friend. Socks, change of clothes, slippers… He had everything ready for his rescue, the only thing missing was for them to call saying: your son is here, he is soaked, but he is here”. The call did not come.
“They told us that they saw a ship upside down, but that they went to refuel and, when they returned, it was gone,” says Remedios.
At eight in the morning, already Wednesday, Lolo’s sister called Maritime Rescue again. The answer, Remedios recalls, paralyzed them: “HWe have gone to the place that the coordinates marked, there was a ship upside downwe had to leave to refuel, we have returned and we have not found anything. The ship was no longer“. The woman adds: “My daughter was told that that night the priority was that two were entering small boats to Spain“.
The coordinates -and the mobile from which Lolo called- located the boat between Granada and Almería. After reading the Salvamento Marítimo report, Remedios thought of two possibilities: “it stated that there were many meters deep. That if it has been swallowed by the sea, the fish would have eaten it”. The second option happens because the two young people would have been dragged by currents towards Algeria, France or Morocco“.
A corpse
The investigators left. Until andn June 2020 a phone call broke into the house of Remedios and Manuel. “they had found a body. It was the scientific police to tell us that They came home to do the DNA test on both of us.“.
“But a body, how, from whom?” The information, until they knew the result, was confidential. “They didn’t tell me anything.” Three weeks later, silence still reigned. “My hair fell out from stress.” She had to ask, insist, for what the European Foundation for Missing Persons Global QSD mediated. “It was horrible,” recalls Remedios. But in the end it wasn’t Lolo.”
Trip to Morocco
The search was officially closed, but not for the relatives. They reread the report, the one that pointed to the possibility that Manuel’s body had been dragged to Algeria, France or Morocco.
“My daughter sold her house so we could travel to Morocco.” The arrival was hard, the road too. “In life I had ridden on a boat. My husband and I did not take our eyes off the ground, we could not look at the water. we thought we were passing where was Lolo, where had he been“recalls his mother.
They moved land and sea. “We were asking if they had found any bodies.” There was no success. “For asking, we even asked in prisons, just in case, in case they had caught him, they had gotten them into trouble…”. From Spain, his sister and his girlfriend, Michelle, spoke almost daily with the Algerian consulate. Nothing led to Manuel.
“Have a missing relative is very hard. Some pay attention to them, others don’t… Having it in the sea, I think it’s even worse.”
Manuel, Lolo, was 25 years old when he left home, “it was the happiest moment of our lives, we were all so well…”. This April, on the 26th, he would celebrate his 38th birthday. “There isn’t a day that we don’t remember him.”
Attentive, hard-working “during the day he was a bricklayer, on weekends he was a doorman at a nightclub in Seville.” He was going to marry Michelle, “in two months the matrimonial file began”. A huge photo of him commands in the living room of her house. They don’t forget it, they still wait for it. She has left a mark, “a lot, in all the places where she has gone”, now she is also a wake. Manuel Ríos Cruz is still missing.