March 21, 2022. "I'll be back in an hour. I'm going to solve an issue." These were the words of Francis (32 years, 1.95m, 85 kg) before disappearing. At home, a friend with whom he was playing PlayStation and his two dogs were waiting for him. He left with one of his two mobiles, his keys and no documentation. He never returned. "The police say the disappearance is voluntary, but that's impossible," laments Juana, his mother. Since then, his mother has undertaken her own investigation, which has taken her to drug towns and the underworld of Hortaleza, her neighborhood.

Juana argues that the circumstances of the disappearance – as well as the events before and after – suggest that it was not something voluntary: she was the victim of a cocaine overturn (a term that refers to the theft of drugs between traffickers), the theft of her car, some Kosovar Albanians owed her money, a man who fits the description of Francisco was seen asking for help in a village ...

"They don't investigate," he laments. "And if my son has been taken out of the way, which is what I believe, there is a murderer on the loose. I don't know if my son is alive, if he's dead, if he's sick... And I'm dying of grief. I can even imagine his corpse decomposing," she says between sobs.

Juana asks that a judge allow an interception of her son's mobile phone to track his last movements in order to clarify his disappearance. "I have filed three complaints but they do not allow us to see the geolocation of the phone because they say he left of his own volition. I don't know where they got that idea. My son left undocumented, without a suitcase and left a friend and his dogs at home. He would never abandon dogs," she says.

Francis' official status of "voluntary disappearance" has prompted his mother to undertake her own parallel investigation. Some investigations in which he even shuffles three scenarios of the death of his son.

The first is that Francisco went to the town of Valdemingómez, where something went wrong during a trapicheo. "It was one of the places he used to go shopping," his mother says. She went there accompanied by her brother and friends of her son. "They told us that a gypsy with a knife and a junkie were behind a very tall boy with a blue sweatshirt [like one of his son's own] who was asking for help before he staggered on a car," he says. "We were asking people who were going to buy drugs and many knew him. They said he used to wear a cap and that he went with his dogs," he recalls. They were also searching for ravines and remote places. They found nothing.

Another scenario that handles is that two friends of his son – one of Russian origin (currently wanted and captured after beating a man by mistake after trying to turn drugs) and another of Spanish origin (a "psychopath" with a restraining order against his ex-partner) – would be those who would be behind his death and the overturn of 15,000 euros in coca months before. "They stole the drugs that were in his room while my son slept in the living room. They knew how to get in and where everything was," he says.

"After Francis disappeared, the Russian spent five days at my son's house. We assume he came in with a card because he didn't have keys. He took a camera from which he allegedly deleted 'compromising photos' in which, according to him, Francis was getting high," he explains. "In addition," she says, "my son had welcomed the other boy, the Spaniard, for a while in his house." Two individuals who, according to Juana, insisted on pointing out to a Kosovar Albanian father and son that they owed "200 or 400 euros" to Francisco and that at some point they had threatened to kill him.

Finally, a month after his disappearance, someone made an appointment with Francisco's health card at a health center. Juana went there to investigate. None of the workers recognized their son.

Now, a year after the disappearance of her son, she begs the authorities that her son's case will not be forgotten.

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