Four years and 21 days, Gina Marín has not slept a full night. Since New Year's Eve 2018, when she believed that hers Henry, her child, had returned home to Orihuela Costa. False alarmed. Until today, when she is no longer Gina, but the mother who has lost her hair and health looking for her son; the woman who has spent nights sleeping on the street, has gone into abandoned houses in case they had thrown her into one, has disguised herself and climbed trees to keep an eye on who she believes responsible for Henry's disappearance. She has said many times that she wants to die and yet she continues to fight: sick, broke and far from the place where everything has been taken from her.
“On the 1st of 2019 my son did not answer me. From work he went to celebrate New Year's Eve with some friends. At four in the morning I had a bad feeling. I heard him come to the door, I got up but it wasn't him. At eight in the morning I started calling him. At 20 years old, he always spoke to me before going to sleep, he told me that he had already arrived or had come to have coffee with me. I called Andrés, my other son. I don't know why your brother turns me off, I told him. It is not normal".
Gina began to search, already in agony. She went to file the complaint at the Orihuela Costa (Alicante) barracks where they lived. “She is over 18 years old, she will be partying. That answered me and I insisted: something has happened to my son. I called the police, all the hospitals. Located in one of the guys at the party, he was on a trip but he gave me the number of another ”.
All the manuals advise reporting as soon as possible because the first few hours are crucial in order not to lose information. Gina followed the manual of her instincts and her heart. Henry's friend told him that they were waiting to tell him what had happened. She and her eldest son ran to the house but they didn't open it. They came back later and there were eight young people waiting for them in the street.
A video
The story destroyed her. At four in the morning, at the time of his bad feeling, one of them, an Icelander with whom Henry had shared a flat for the last few months, began to hit him. "They told me that the blows were all to the head and they sounded like firecrackers." They threw him out into the street half naked, he asked for help and called her: "Mom, mom."
Gina is convinced that she didn't come out of that corner. The mother put the party companions in the car and took them to the barracks. "She agreed on what to say, they were sending messages." One of them flew to his country, Iceland, the next day. He has declared but much later.
The Civil Guard began the search and there were raids, although Gina and her family went out daily to explore every corner. No sign. One day in one of these desperate processions, in a park, one of Henry's classmates who was in the house showed a video. She saw him and fainted. Her son was beaten to death.
"Why didn't they help him, why didn't they call an ambulance?" he continues to wonder four years later. The complete sequence lost, boring; Only a part that is included in the summary was recovered.
“The sergeant and the lieutenant told me: without a body there is no crime, Gina. I couldn't take it anymore." “You know my son is dead”, she told them many times. The woman, mother of two other children, came to sleep on the street, she spent day and night putting up posters and searching, asking anyone. She would dress up and climb a tree to keep an eye on the Icelander. She left the beauty salon that she ran, with five employees, and in which Henry acted as a translator for the foreign clientele that crowded her business.
She showed up time and time again at the barracks so that they put more means, so that they would not stop looking for her child. "He was blessed", she repeats on the phone without stopping crying. “We put a detective, but the sergeant told me: 'Gina, don't spend any more money.' Anyway, he didn't have it anymore."
The cameras, many in those urbanizations, did not pick up the image of Henry. Her mother, turned researcher out of desperation, has her own theory. That night, the Icelander, the roommate Henry was leaving to go back to his mother's, was the one who hit him on the head. She believes that Henry threatened to sue him for an episode that occurred days before.
On Christmas Eve, his son came to the hairdresser's with a girl and asked his mother for permission to have dinner with them. Gina was not amused, she was Icelandic and a stranger. "He has a problem, mom, he can't stay with Álex (the roommate) in the house," she said. The next day she was taken to the airport. Now they know what "the problem" was. They located the young woman and she told them that she had been raped by the same individual who supposedly hit Henry. Gina continues to beg him to report her. For her that is the trigger of what happened.
Friends say that Henry fled injured. The mother knows that he did not leave that house alive. The Civil Guard registered it but time later. "They ignored us because he was a boy and of legal age," he lamented.
Henry, who came from Colombia very young, studied and worked. He wanted to be a civil guard. Gina she thought she was going crazy in confinement when she couldn't go out looking. She sent her six-year-old girl to Murcia with her father, unable to take care of her. "I just wanted to die, but the psychiatrist asked me to give myself a chance."
The woman, who had worked as a makeup artist on television and set up a successful beauty center, fled to London where a friend lives so as not to go crazy. Without tension or to eat. She had lost her hair and suffers continuous stress bleeding. She is now a cleaner and lives with her daughter, pending the phone 24 hours a day. The European Foundation for Missing Persons QSDglobal calls Henry's case "dramatic" and is helping Gina, the example of a family destroyed by a disappearance.
