Boston Police Took 45 Days to Tell the Public Reina Morales Rojas Was Missing. Three Years Later, She Still Is.

Reina Carolina Morales Rojas came to the United States from El Salvador in May 2022. She was 41. Her two children stayed behind with her sister, and she video-called them almost every day from East Boston, where she worked food service at Logan Airport. "She's an excellent mother and a great sister," her sister Alicia told PBS NewsHour.

On the night of November 26, 2022, she was seen getting into a silver van on Bennington Street in East Boston and was dropped off in Somerville. Just after midnight, both of her cell phones went dark. "I just felt something was wrong," Alicia said, "because she never turned her phone off." Unable to reach her from El Salvador, Alicia got Reina's landlord to file a missing-person report with Boston police on November 28.

Then: nothing. Not for six and a half weeks.

The 45 days of silence

Boston police did not tell the public that Reina was missing until January 12, 2023 — 45 days after the report was filed. The first alert misspelled her name.

That delay is not a claim her family makes; it's one the department concedes. "Our investigative team regrettably did not share her information publicly until January 12th," BPD said in a statement that January. On camera with PBS NewsHour that March, Deputy Superintendent Victor Evans went further: "It's a misstep that happened. And we as a police department own it, and it shouldn't have happened." Asked whether a six-week delay was standard protocol, he answered: "No, it's not."

No fuller explanation of how the case sat for 45 days has ever been offered publicly.

Same state, same winter

While Reina's case sat unannounced, another Massachusetts woman went missing: Ana Walshe, last seen January 1, 2023, and reported missing three days later. Her case was publicized within days and became wall-to-wall national news. None of that is the Walshe family's fault — every missing person deserves that urgency. The question is why the system produces it for some and not others. Boston Globe columnist Marcela García asked the question in a column headline that January: "An immigrant from East Boston has been missing for two months. Where is the nonstop coverage?"

The disparity isn't a feeling; it's measurable. The Columbia Journalism Review built a tool that models — estimates, not counts — how many news stories a missing person is likely to get based on who they are. For a 41-year-old Latina missing in Massachusetts, it predicts about 8 stories. For a white woman the same age in the same state, at least 23. For a white woman in her early twenties, more than 120. They are estimates of likely coverage, not counts of Reina's — but the pattern they describe is the one her family lived.

Part of the problem is the data itself: federal missing-person records logged over 271,000 missing women and girls in 2022, but the ethnicity field was completed in fewer than one in five cases. You cannot fully count a disparity the system doesn't record.

The community that wouldn't drop it

East Boston's Latino community pushed the case into public view. Lucy Pineda of Latinos Unidos en Massachusetts organized vigils and demanded meetings: "If the designated authorities had taken immediate action on Reina's case, we could have had a different outcome." When advocates met with BPD that January, the department barred the civil-rights lawyers accompanying them from the room, according to Lawyers for Civil Rights.

By late February, six Boston city councilors issued a joint statement: "Missing cases of women of color are often unmet with the same urgency as their white counterparts." That March — with coverage tying the proposal to Reina's case — Governor Maura Healey proposed $300,000 to create a statewide Missing and Unidentified Persons Coordination Unit.

What we know, and what nobody does

Here is the honest ledger. Known: who she is, when and where she was last seen, when the report was filed, the 45-day delay the department itself owns. Claimed: nothing about what happened to her — no theory has ever been offered publicly by police or family that we would repeat as fact. Unknown: whether Reina is alive, what happened after she was dropped off in Somerville, and why her case sat in silence for a month and a half beyond the word "misstep."

In January 2025, remains found under the McArdle Bridge in East Boston were identified as Elba Portillo, another East Boston woman who had been reported missing — not Reina; coverage of that identification noted that Reina was still missing. As of this writing — more than three years after she was last seen — Reina Carolina Morales Rojas has never been found. Her case remains open with Boston PD's A-7 detectives: anyone with information can call (617) 343-4328, or reach CrimeStoppers anonymously at 1-800-494-8477.

She is the second face in this series. The pattern is the story: a real person, a documented record, and a silence the department has never explained beyond the word "misstep."

The receipts

• PBS NewsHour, March 28, 2023 — the on-camera BPD admission and family interviews.
• Boston Police Department missing-person alerts (Jan 12, 2023; Nov 28, 2023) and FBI ViCAP listing.
• CommonWealth Beacon, Jan 27, 2023 — BPD's written "regrettably" statement; lawyers barred from the meeting.
• Boston.com, Feb 27, 2023 — the councilors' statement and LUMA's demands.
• Columbia Journalism Review, "Are You Pressworthy?" (modeled coverage estimates); Women's Media Center analysis, June 2024.
• Charley Project case file and Boston PD's alert page (case status).