Camila Mendoza Olmos walked out of her family’s house in northwest Bexar County before sunrise on December 24, stepped toward her parked car, and disappeared into the dark. Security video shows the 19-year-old opening the driver-side door, leaning inside, then closing it again. She never got back in. Instead she walked away with only her keys and license, leaving her phone on the bed and her family waiting for eggs and cinnamon rolls that never came.
Five days later the search has jumped the border. What began as a local missing-person case is now an international hunt that stretches from the suburbs of San Antonio to the Mexican state of Nuevo León, where Camila was born and where relatives still live. The Nuevo León Attorney General’s office issued its own bulletin, warning that she may have been taken across the frontier against her will. FBI agents and Homeland Security officers have joined sheriff’s deputies, scanning license-plate readers, border-crossing logs, and bus-station cameras for any trace of the teen.
Sheriff Javier Salazar says every door is still open: kidnapping, human-trafficking, or a voluntary flight from something no one has yet uncovered. Camila had recently ended a romantic relationship, but both she and her ex-boyfriend described the split as friendly, and he is not a suspect. Early rumors that she might have been detained by ICE were checked and dismissed; there is no record of any immigration stop. What remains is a blank space where a young woman should be.
More than a hundred volunteers—cousins, classmates, strangers who learned of the search on social media—have trudged through brush and along drainage ditches near the family’s subdivision, calling her name until their voices cracked. Tracking dogs followed scents that ended at a nearby access road, a hint that she may have gotten into a second vehicle. Beyond that, the trail goes cold.
Camila is 5-foot-4, slim, with light-brown wavy hair and fair skin. On Christmas Eve she wore a black hoodie, black leggings, and white sneakers—clothes that could blend into any crowd on either side of the border. Her parents cling to the hope that someone, somewhere, saw her and will remember. Flyers in English and Spanish paper shop windows from San Antonio to Monterrey, and the hashtag #FindCamila pulses on phones in two languages.
Authorities urge anyone who was traveling through Laredo or any other crossing on December 24 to scroll back through phone photos: a girl in the background, a face in a convenience-store line, a car with Texas plates that looks wrong for the moment. Sheriff Salazar has promised the search will not stop at the Rio Grande. “We don’t care where the trail leads,” he said. “We’re bringing Camila home.”
