9-year-old Maribel vanished 40 years ago. Family and a Homestead detective still searching
NOVEMBER 17, 2021
On that dreadful afternoon, 9-year-old Maribel Oquendo, a few quarters in her pocket, left her Homestead apartment building to buy candy at the convenience store. Less than an hour later, her older sister and mother realized Maribel had not returned.
They frantically rushed to Food Spot #21 at the Sky Vista Shopping Center. Yes, a clerk told them, Maribel had bought candy, walked out, got into a waiting car and vanished.
That was Dec. 6, 1982. Nearly four decades later, Maribel remains missing in one of South Florida’s least known missing persons cases. It’s a puzzle kept alive only by her older sister, Clarabel Garay, who has crisscrossed the Eastern Seaboard looking for signs of Maribel, and a dogged Homestead police detective.
The assumption — then, and now — is that Maribel was kidnapped by her abusive father, Emilio Oquendo, who’d vowed to get even with the girl’s mother for leaving him. But after years estranged, Garay finally tracked down her father, who is now 83 and suffering from dementia. He’s steadfastly refused to say if he knows what happened to the little girl, instead giving only cryptic remarks. Is Maribel dead? Is she alive?
“He would never tell me,” Garay said. “He would only say, ‘The same way you found me, you can find her.’ ”
The investigation is now in the hands of Homestead Detective Jennifer Roa, who was just a toddler when Maribel vanished. She keeps a photo of Maribel — big eyed and serious, wearing a birthday party hat — on her desk as inspiration.
“This case has consumed me,” Roa said. “It’s very deflating because you feel like you’re so close.” Oquendo, reached at his nursing home in Lakeland, insisted in an interview with the Herald that he had nothing to do with the girl’s disappearance. He disputed her age — he claimed she was 7 when she vanished — and claimed she vanished from school, not a convenience store.
“They’re all lies, what they say,” Oquendo said when asked about his own older daughter’s belief that he kidnapped Maribel.
A DIFFERENT ERA
Maribel disappeared in the early 1980s — a different time in law enforcement, and how the public perceives missing persons cases.
Back then, there were no Amber alerts to broadcast via Twitter pages, smartphone alerts and electronic Turnpike billboards. Police agencies and average citizens didn’t have access to today’s powerful missing persons databases. Suspected parental kidnappings rarely elicited much media coverage.
Maribel’s case got little attention back then. The Herald didn’t even do a blurb. Two weeks after Maribel vanished, the South Dade News Leader, a stalwart community newspaper, did a short story noting that police had searched a dump in Florida City, finding a shoe that possibly may have belonged to Maribel.
“I have completely scanned Homestead and haven’t come up with anything yet,” a detective told the newspaper at the time.
What led Homestead police to the dump is unclear — and the original police file on Maribel vanished, likely destroyed when Hurricane Andrew leveled South Dade in 1992.
This they did uncover: In the early 1980s, Maribel was one of three biological children of Emiliano Oquendo and Ana Maria Hernandez. Oquendo was a heavy drug user who physically and mentally abused Hernandez while they lived in New Jersey, according to the family.
Hernandez left Oquendo, taking her children to Puerto Rico, and eventually back to New Jersey — where he stalked her, according to his daughter. By 1982, they’d moved to the apartment in South Florida, where he managed to find them again, even though he was living in West Palm Beach.
According to Garay, who was 17 at the time, Oquendo showed up at the house three days before the disappearance, demanding his former girlfriend take him back. She refused. “He picked up a knife and he tried to stab her. I got in the way, crying and arguing with him,” Garay, now 56, recalled.
And, she recalled, Oquendo made a cryptic remark: “I’m going to take away the thing you love the most.”
The afternoon of the disappearance, Garay — who lived in a different apartment in the same complex as her mother’s — was home when a friend of Oquendo’s suddenly showed up, saying he needed pliers because his car broke down. Maribel walked in, saying she wanted to buy candy at the Food Spot.
The man gave her some quarters. Garay told her to grab another one of her siblings, and ask permission from her mother. Maribel, however, instead went to the store by herself.
Detectives are still working to identify that friend of Oquendo’s.
By the time Garay and Hernandez made it to the Food Spot, the clerk told her Maribel had actually spent $5 to buy candy, and then gotten into a car with several men. “I assumed it was all planned by my dad,” Garay said.
Hernandez and Garay called Homestead police, who immediately launched a search. A few weeks later, the mother and daughter found Oquendo in Lake Worth, where they saw him driving away with what appeared to be a little girl inside the car. When he eventually returned, he was alone.
“If you want to see your daughter again, you come live with me,” Garay recalled him telling her mother.
She refused. Oquendo eventually disappeared again — and fell off the map for years, living on the streets while racking up a string of petty arrests across Florida, for stealing cars, cocaine possession and shoplifting, among other charges.
The case revived in 2004, when Hernandez and Garay walked into the Homestead police station to inquire about the case.
A REVIVED CASE
The investigation was eventually assigned to Roa, of Homestead police’s special victims unit.
For years, she’s pored through records trying to piece together Maribel’s early life. The girl’s family was able to provide a copy of her last immunization record.
Maribel might have attended West Homestead Elementary — a sibling and cousin went to the school. But the Miami-Dade school district can’t find any records on her. And Roa can’t ask Maribel’s mother. She died in 2015.
“It’s like she didn’t exist,” Roa said. “I can’t get any information on her. How does no teacher ever wonder what ever happened to this student?”
Roa even tracked down the original owner of Food Spot #21, but he no longer has any records of the employees who might have worked at the store almost 40 years ago. No one else knows anything about the still-unidentified men in the car that the clerk recalls bore Maribel away.
The interviews have been exhaustive. Roa tracked down most of Oquendo’s siblings, other children and associates — and most are dead.
There’s nothing on paper so far to suggest Maribel is alive. The U.S. Department of Labor reported her Social Security number hasn’t been used for wages in Florida. The U.S. Social Security Administration won’t release any information on the little girl’s Social Security number unless she is recorded as deceased.
Still, Roa’s searched variations of Maribel’s names to see if she would be using them now. Maribel was sometimes called Marilyn, and also had the surname Carrero. No luck.
She’s also interviewed a slew of Maribel Oquendos, living as far away as New York City. Some were evasive at first, but all could provide verifiable details about their childhoods. “I’ve lost track of how many,” Roa said.
Even in his old age, Oquendo himself has refused to give answers. In interviews with police, he’s repeatedly denied involvement. Reached by the Herald, he insisted he helped look for the child and instead blamed Hernandez. But he couldn’t explain why the girl’s mother would take a child she already had custody of.
“I can’t say. We looked for her. She never appeared,” Oquendo said.
Although Garay eventually established somewhat of a relationship with him — she cared for him for several months earlier this year, before he was taken to a nursing home — he stubbornly said little about the case, she said.
“I tried to find out, to find out if he’s softening,” Garay said. “I used to get on my knees, beg him and cry for him to tell me. And he would say, ‘No. I don’t know nothing.’ Then, he would just start laughing.”
Roa and Garay believe there are people alive, maybe in the Vega Alta region of Puerto Rico, or New Jersey or Florida, who may know what happened but have been scared of Oquendo. But now, he’s elderly and no longer a threat, Garay said.
“I’m hoping she’s alive, but we don’t know that. There’s nothing to prove she’s alive. There’s nothing to prove she’s dead,” Garay said. “I miss her. I miss her smile, her eyes, her joy. Her singing and dancing and playing.”
Anyone with information on Maribel’s disappearance can call Detective Roa at 305-224-5436, or Miami-Dade CrimeStoppers at 305-471-8477.
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