Police have plenty of clues to what happened to northern California teen Pearl Pinson, who was kidnapped at gunpoint nine years ago while walking to school.
They have a dead suspect, a getaway car, the gun and zip ties used to kidnap the 15-year-old — and even a fake “suicide letter” meant to hide the circumstances of her death.
The only thing they don’t have is any idea where Pinson is, or what really happened to her.
The mystery still tortures Pinson’s loved ones, who gathered for a candlelight vigil Sunday night at the last place she was seen in 2016 in her Bay Area hometown of Vallejo.
“It gets worse every year,” her father, James Pinson told the Post-Herald last year.
One photo of Pinson that has been widely circulated by her loved ones features the teen staring directly at the camera with one piercing blue eye, the other covered by her dark locks.
It is a haunting reminder that her family has never learned her fate.
The missing persons alert for Pinson has stayed open since witnesses saw a man grab her on a pedestrian overpass, hold her at gunpoint with a .38-caliber revolver and drag her away as she screamed for help on May 25, 2016.
Surveillance footage caught a gold Saturn belonging to 19-year-old Fernando Castro leaving the scene, and cops found .38-caliber ammo, zip ties, a homemade gun silencer and a fake “suicide note” in Castro’s house, according to the Daily Republic.
Police spotted Castro himself 30 hours later in Santa Barbara County — a six-hour drive from Vallejo.
Castro led cops on a white-knuckle chase that involved multiple shootouts that finally ended when officers shot him dead as he tried to ram them with his car, according to a report by the Santa Barbara County district attorney’s office.
“Sadly, he may have taken the secret of what happened to Pearl with him to his grave,” the sheriff of Solano County, which includes Vallejo, wrote on Facebook Sunday.
The post came with a reminder that Pinson’s case is still open and a call for information that could help authorities locate her.
Pinson’s family returns to the scene of her kidnapping every year to honor the lost girl, who is 24 now. They are also pushing for the pedestrian bridge to be named after her.
But the family has long given up hope that she might be found alive.
“One day I said to myself, ‘I may never see her again.’ Reality hit,” Pearl’s sister Rose told the Post-Herald in 2023.
“Even though there are cases open for 20 plus years and they have people hidden in sheds. … But my sister is not here because she was shot and I believe killed here because of a (expletive) who would rather take a girl instead of getting the mental help he needed or whatever he was going through,” she told the outlet.
