An American Airlines flight attendant has mysteriously vanished in Colombia during what should have been a routine crew layover — setting off an urgent, cross-border search and leaving colleagues scrambling for answers.
Eric Fernando Gutierrez Molina, 32, is based out of Dallas-Fort Worth and had arrived in Medellín late Saturday night on a flight from Miami, according to local reports.
He and fellow crew members were slated for a brief overnight stay before catching a return flight to the US early Sunday morning, but Molina never made it back to the airport.
Authorities say the last confirmed sighting of Molina was in Medellín’s La América neighborhood in the early hours of Sunday, a mostly residential area not typically associated with tourist activity.
After that, his movements become unclear, and investigators have been left piecing together a timeline with limited information.
The mystery deepened after a close friend, Sharom Gil, told Telemedellín that Molina had allegedly been invited to go out and party — and was later found disoriented and taken to a medical center.
Exactly when that occurred — and how he later disappeared again — remains unknown, adding another troubling layer to the case.
The last trace of the flight attendant was a message sent in the early hours of the morning sharing his location at an Airbnb in the El Poblado neighborhood, about 12 miles from Medellín’s José María Córdova International Airport.
Friends and coworkers have since filed missing persons reports in both Dallas and Medellín as concern grows.
The airline has also notified the US embassy in Colombia.
In a statement to NBC 5, American Airlines said: “We are actively engaged with local law enforcement officials in their investigation and doing all we can to support our team member’s family during this time.”
The Association of Professional Flight Attendants echoed that message, saying it was “supporting all efforts to help locate our missing colleague in Colombia.”
Experts say cases like this are not unheard of in the region, but the longer someone remains unaccounted for, the more concerning it becomes.
Arturo Fontes, who spent nearly three decades handling missing persons investigations and later worked extensively in South America, said individuals are sometimes located alive but in a confused or vulnerable state.
Still, Molina’s continued absence is raising alarms.
“What they’re going to do normally is go to the last location he’s been to, whether it’s a bar or a restaurant,” Fontes said. “And then they’re going to track maybe the cameras and try to locate where the last place he went. If he had a cellphone, the first thing they will look at is the telephone to see what his last location was.”
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