LONG ISLAND CITY, Queens (PIX11) – The daughter of a missing Queens mom, Yecely Sanchez, appealed to the public for help in tracing her mother’s movements on New Year’s night.
“She doesn’t have any enemies, she’s such a kind soul,” said Yinelsy Gomez near the family home at Queensbridge Houses.
“Even out here, she feeds the cats,” Gomez said.
However, there hasn’t been a trace of Sanchez, a 43-year-old mother of four, since she told her son she was going to check something in the car about 9:30 p.m. New Year’s night.
The daughter told PIX11 News police said they had two clues about her mother’s movements that night.
First, a security guard found Sanchez’s cell phone on the floor of Mount Sinai West Hospital on 10th Avenue in Manhattan.
But there’s no indication Sanchez was ever admitted into the hospital.
The second clue came on the walkway of the Ed Koch/Queensboro Bridge, which is near the family’s home.
A pedestrian found something belonging to Sanchez that night.
“She had a little backpack with her,” Sanchez’s daughter said. “They just said it was on the bridge, wet from the rain.”
PIX11 News learned there may have been some surveillance showing Sanchez at Mount Sinai West, but none that showed her on the bridge.
“It would have been much better for the investigators if the phone was with her,” said retired NYPD Detective Joseph Giacalone, now a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
“The cell phone would have been a very important part of it, being able to track her movements.”
Sanchez’s daughter said her mother used to get sad sometimes over personal issues.
PIX11 News also followed up on a different case we reported last week, the disappearance of 31-year-old Dulce Lopez, who had recent manic depressive episodes.
Lopez’s mother, Noemy Brinson, flew from Longview, Texas to New York on Dec. 19, and she’s been searching the streets and subway lines every day, even in the bitter cold.
After PIX11 News aired Lopez’s story last Thursday, Jan. 6, a viewer texted Brinson an address on East 194th Street in the Bronx, with no message.
We met Brinson there last Friday, near the intersection of Valentine Avenue, but there was no sign of Dulce Lopez.
“I don’t know how she’s surviving,” the mother said of her daughter, who went missing Nov. 29 during a stressful time with her new boyfriend.
Lopez was spotted two weeks later, on Dec. 16, on Bainbridge Avenue near East 207th Street.
She sat on a box outside a mini mart for two days.
She told some neighbors she’d been riding the subway trains to keep warm.
Then, she disappeared.
PIX11 News received a tip about another Lopez sighting last Friday, outside a bakery on West Fordham Road at the intersection of University Place.
When we went there, there was no sign of her.
The woman who contacted us said, “The face was so distinctive! I just saw it on WPIX.”
She said the person she saw , “had a distinctive mole on her face, with a hood on her head.”
The person was wearing a dark, bubble coat and “she was just walking back and forth,” the woman told us.
Right after the story aired on PIX11 News, a viewer had called saying he saw someone who looked like Lopez on Broadway and West 103rd Street, turning around in circles.
Lopez’s case caught the attention of the NYPD Missing Persons Squad, which tweeted photos of the woman last weekend and sent out an all-city alert.
Lopez’s mother is committed to finding her daughter.
As for Yinelsy Gomez in Queens, she yearns for any small detail that could answer more questions about her mother’s disappearance.
“I just hope that we find you soon,” she said in a message to her mother, as her voice broke with emotion. “We miss you and we love you.”
