A skull, a tibia and a family that wants closure. Are Fresno police doing enough?

Luis A. Montana went missing on Nov. 30, 2019 at the age of 20. On Oct. 5, 2021, his skull was found about a mile and a half from the Fresno home where he lived with his parents.

Since Montana’s skull was found almost a year ago in an empty 20-acre lot that’s in between three cemeteries west of Highway 99, at least one other human bone has been found. However, the rest of Montana’s remains haven’t been located.

On a recent hot afternoon, the large dirt lot was empty. But in a corner of the lot, someone’s black and white sneaker laid on the ground.

Fresno Police Lt. Paul Cervantes, who has been in touch with the family, said investigators have done everything they possibly can, and unless new information comes in, there’s little else they can do.

Montana’s parents, however, say police haven’t shown much interest in solving their son’s case because they are Hispanic. The family is now hoping authorities will help them set up a reward to see if it will result in leads that can move their son’s case forward.

The family had plans to search for their son’s remains again this Saturday, but have now canceled because police told them they need permission from the lot owners.

The case remains an open investigation.

“I want to have closure as a family,” Luis’ mother, Graciela Alvarez Montana, said in Spanish this week during an interview with The Bee. “To have a place to take him flowers. Right now, we don’t have anything.”

Montana’s parents say their son disappeared after two of his friends, whom they identified by name, came to their house asking for Luis. The Bee is not naming the two friends because police say they have been interviewed by investigators and are not persons of interest in the case.

The day of Montana’s disappearance, the family was celebrating the birthday of one of their younger sons. The parents say Luis, who took medication for ADHD, left with his friends but told them he would come back soon.

The couple says their son never came back, and three days later, they filed a missing person’s report with Fresno police. After that, they say police would only tell them their son was an adult and he would probably return home at some point.

Missing case now labeled ‘suspicious death’

After Luis’ skull was found, Fresno Police stopped treating it as a missing person’s case, and labeled it a “suspicious death.” It’s not considered a homicide investigation, Cervantes said.

“I can tell you that there’s nothing on the skull that would indicate to us that this is a homicide,” Cervantes told The Bee. “In other words, there’s no trauma to the skull itself.”

An example of trauma, he said, could be a fracture “as a result of being bludgeoned or if there was a bullet hole.”

“But I think it’s pretty obvious by virtue of the fact that we just have a skull and no remains,” he said. “That’s why it’s still a suspicious death.”

Luis’ parents say a person has claimed to have seen their son’s two friends and two others beating their son and kidnapping him by putting him in a vehicle. Antonio Montana, Luis’ father, said he’s also heard that it may have been over a girl.

Cervantes said investigators have not found any evidence of a kidnapping or assault.

“There’s been multiple interviews with multiple folks,” Cervantes said. “No, we don’t have anybody that we can identify as a person of interest, per se. Any person that we thought were a person of interest, we’ve already spoken to and had interviews with them already.”

And police, he said, have “yet to make a determination if there’s any foul play.”

“There’s a lot of little nuances to the case that I can’t discuss because the case is still an open investigation,” Cervantes said.

Unfortunately at this point, he said, police don’t have any evidence to indicate Luis “died at the hands of another.” But police, he said, have gone “above and beyond” and have given the case “a lot of attention.”

“All we have is a skull in a field,” he said. “We’d love to have more information to follow up on, but at this point, we don’t have any other leads to follow up on.”

These types of cases, he said, are never closed. Police hope that one day they will have information that would help them locate the rest of Luis’ remains, he said, and give the “family some type of closure.”

Parents search for son’s remains with help from the Armadillos

Last October, Luis’ parents were informed by someone in the Fresno County Coroner’s Office their son’s skull had been located in the lot near a fence and train tracks. But it wasn’t found by police.

“The skull was turned over to us by a citizen,” Tony Botti, spokesman for the Fresno County Sheriff-Coroner’s Office, told The Bee. “We ran DNA on it and confirmed it to be Luis Montana.”

Botti said authorities “canvassed the field” where the skull was found “multiple times.”

“We did later find a tibia,” he said. “It is undergoing a DNA test and the results are not back yet. We have no information to tell us the story of how the skull and tibia got to that area.”

Botti said there is a “hunch” that the tibia doesn’t belong to Luis, but officials didn’t want to speculate and are awaiting the results.

Luis’ parents say the human leg bone was found by a group from San Diego and Ensenada, Baja California, “Armadillos Ni Un Inmigrante Menos,” that has come twice to help them search for their son’s remains.

After the skull was located, Luis’ parents say they begged police to search for the rest of their son’s remains to no avail. The family in May did TV interviews as part of the efforts to bring attention to their son’s case.

The parents say they reached out to the Armadillos group, which has expertise in searching for remains, after police weren’t showing much interest. The parents and the group searched for about four hours on May 14 when they came across the human bone.

Only after that, Luis’ parents say, did police search the field and found about eight other bones. Cervantes said those weren’t human bones.

Cervantes said police have been to the field several times. In May, he said, there was a large-scale operation that involved several agencies, including the Fresno homicide unit, the Fresno crime scene bureau, the Fresno County Coroner’s Office, the Fresno chaplain team, Fresno police cadets, the Fresno County Sheriff’s Office special response team and PG&E, which has ground-penetrating search equipment.

An anthropologist from Fresno State also was there.

“Unfortunately, that day we did not find any other remains,” Cervantes said.

On June 4, the family returned to search again with the Armadillos group. In a letter the mother recently wrote, she says Cervantes promised the family he would send a support group on the day of their June search, but no one from the department showed up.

“I’m tired of feeling how they denigrate us!” the mother wrote. “I feel cheated by the authorities, full of anger and helplessness.”