Family appeals for help to find missing woman
When Astrid Perera, thirty-eight year old co-owner of the technology store U.S. COM, went missing in the middle of last month and her employee, twenty-two year old Luis Valdez, disappeared a week later, most people concluded that the two lovers had run off together. But nearly a month later, with no word from either, Perera’s family has gone on the offensive and is seeking the public’s assistance in locating their loved one. While the police investigation appears to have stalled, the family says they believe Astrid may be in trouble. According to her brother, Doctor Jose Perera, the family’s last communication with her was the weekend of July nineteenth, when she was supposed to have travelled to the United States on company business. But she never used the plane ticket, and has not been seen since. And now her diary has turned up, and while it appears to back up the original conclusion that she ran off with Valdez, the family smells a rat. Jose says the soap opera story of his sister running off with her lover that is being sold to the public just does not add up.
Dr. Jose Perera, Astrid’s Brother
“The evidence they are using is her diary. And in the last two pages of her diary there are a few paragraphs, an entire two pages consists of the message that she went away with someone. And the message that okay, my ex-husband can stay with everything and my baby and everything, you know, that’s the message that every paragraph is giving you. And it looks a lot like her handwriting except that the letters are a bit bigger…The only thing with that composition there, those two pages is that they have a lot of grammatical errors that Astrid would not do.”
Patrick Jones
“What role do you think her husband, her ex-husband has played in her disappearance, if any?”
Jose Perera
“From what I have learned, it seems that he has the stage set from before she disappeared. He had the stage plain and set. He gave the security guards the weekend off about two weeks before her disappearance. Suddenly they can have the weekend off [when] before they had to work all weekend, so the securities are gone. Suddenly he pressured and pushed so that my sister Iris can go to Guatemala because she was sick and to take his daughter to Guatemala. So it looks like he has been setting this stage. And God forgive me if I’m making a mistake, but that is the way it looks, that is the evidence we have, that is what has been happening. Now this man is very obsessed with my sister. He showed me a pile of her personal correspondence that he had gathered from the year 2001. He had her passwords to her email accounts and he showed me this pile, you know, of all her personal correspondence from way back. And how do you get that password, he said well, the technicians got it for me.”
“He showed me how he could actually write like Astrid. He was giving me examples. You know, at the beginning of a sentence Astrid always write an “A” like this, she will never write a round “A”. And she writes this letter like that and he was enthusiastic showing me how he can write like Astrid. And then he’s giving me examples. And then I tell him: and you can sign like her? Yes I can sign like her, of course. Let me see. He signs Astrid. And I tell him, well listen that’s Astrid’s signature, but you made the same mistake you made on the diary, because the “R” that you wrote there is not the “R” that Astrid usually signs. It’s the “R” that he usually writes.”
Patrick Jones
“Outside of that, what are you thinking? Where is Astrid?”
Dr. Jose Perera
“I pray to God and I want to believe that she is alive and if she is alive, she’s kidnapped, she is being held against her will. She has absolutely no access to a computer or a telephone or to pen or paper. She has no way of communicating with us, as we have proven by the past from the nineteenth of July that she was missing… from that date on, no one, not in Belize and not abroad, I am talking about England, the U.S., we check Honduras, we check Guatemala. All of her friends, wherever they are, they have not received any information from here. We’ve called everyone and they keep calling constantly to find out what’s the latest on Astrid.”
Patrick Jones
“Now if your sister is watching the news right now, what would you want to say to her?”
Dr. Jose Perera
“I want my sister to know that I love her, and we all love her and that we’ll keep looking for her.”
Dr. Perera says that the family has found out that the hard drive on Astrid’s laptop computer has been formatted, thereby deleting all information, as has the hard drive on Valdez’s desktop computer. The Perera family is appealing to anyone who may know the whereabouts of Astrid to call the police at 922 or her sister Iris Williams at 223-0827.
