It all started with a Facebook post to a Mt. Laurel, New Jersey Facebook group in which I am a member…
A group member had posted about an unidentified man lying sick and disoriented in a hospital bed at Temple Hospital in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in hopes someone would recognize him. His photo was circulated to many other sites as well.
I stumbled on this post and decided I would personally try to find the unidentified patient’s identity, wondering if his family was searching for him. (For newer readers to this website, I search for missing people and identify unidentified people.) A huge thank you goes to the group creator and the person who shared this post, as this case would not be solved without them.
I conducted a search for the unidentified patient’s identity. I knew that he was likely originally from outside of the country, due to the fact he was said to not speak much English. I wondered if he had been a general missing person—or a missing fugitive. Upon the search, I found a fitting profile of a fugitive who went missing from Puerto Rico in 2008. This man was not listed in NamUs, the governmental database for missing people. (For those unfamiliar with this process, cases from Puerto Rico are in fact placed in this database, typically, but fugitives are a more tricky matter.) This is why the John Doe was not identified right away. For months no one could identify him, until I saw the Facebook post. After my search, I strongly believed the fugitive’s profile I came across and the unidentified man were a match. I contacted the detective working on the fugitive’s case in Ponce, Puerto Rico. After a few months, the detective was able to conclude that my tip was a success; the fugitive was in fact the unidentified man at Temple Hospital.
The man, Jose J. Gonzalez Sanchez, also known as “Wicharo,” became a fugitive when he was 60 years old on May 4, 2015, after committing murder via arson on Las Flores Street in the Cantera neighborhood of Senorial City, Ponce, Puerto Rico. The fire was deemed deliberate, with the intent to murder a man named Jesus Martinez Rojas, who was aged 76 at the time. Martinez Rojas passed away just four days after being taken to the hospital for his burns. The editorial Voces Del Sur released a plea to the public in 2018 for the importance of Gonzalez Sanches to be located, as he was deemed dangerous for apparent reasons.
Gonzalez Sanches wound up with a bail of 1 million dollars. It was discovered he had been living under the radar and using an alias in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania until he became too ill to function independently and remain in hiding. He was then placed in the care of Temple Hospital, which later released the online blurb trying to identify him. This was the same blurb that was shared to the aforementioned Facebook group.
Although the patient is now identified as Gonzalez Sanchez, he is deemed too unwell to endure prison and will be living in a care facility instead in Pennsylvania.
After I was able to locate this fugitive along with the help of Temple and the person who shared his post, I subsequently went on to solve another case from Ponce, Puerto Rico of another unidentified / missing man, which you can read about here.
The reason why neither the case of Gonzalez Sanches nor the case of Cortes Rivera were solved right away—the latter taking over ten years—comes down to several factors. Mainly, neither were found in any database for missing people or unidentified remains. I personally keep my own detailed database of fugitives, unreported missing people, and underrepresented cases—many of which that are not even in NamUs, hence the lack of connecting the dots between a missing and unidentified case, when there is a match. I created this database years ago in effort to track cases that would be unlikely to get a match without a DNA test. DNA is a powerful tool, which I use often to identify unidentified remains or unidentified living people; however, in some cases, like this, as you can see, DNA could not solve his case immediately. A DNA test is not always promptly administered. There are even cases from several decades ago that are just now being identified due to newer technology. There is a lengthy queue in cold cases needing DNA extraction or forensic genealogy measures, and it can be a more lengthy process, a process in which some cases may not be fortunate to receive in the first several years of being unidentified. I imagine that in the next 10–15 years we will have much less unidentified cases in NamUs or in general.
In Gonzalez Sanchez’s case, as stated, there was no profile in any internal database that I could find for him being missing; I happened to find his information from his fugitive / bail flyer.
I hope this helps spread the word of the power of social media. As much as I recognize so many drawbacks to social media, it helps in these cases.
