Missing Persons Day Helps Mom's 3-Year Search For Daughter

NEW YORK — Rose Cobo last heard from her adopted daughter, Chelsea, on the night of May 6, 2016. Trying to keep busy in the first 24 hours before she reported her missing, the Borough Park mother did two simple things she now regrets.

She went grocery shopping and made Chelsea’s favorite meal, a simple dish of rice and lentils. She also did the young woman’s laundry.

It took Rose more than two years to go grocery shopping again. And she now laments washing away her daughter’s scent, a fresh, sweet odor layered with her favorite Juicy Couture perfume, which Rose now occasionally wears.

Nearly three years after Chelsea’s disappearance, questions rumble through Rose’s mind like clothes in a spin cycle.

"My life has been like a washing machine," said Rose, who turns 55 on Saturday. "I’m just turned, tossed — is she alive? is she dead? Is she here? Is she there?"

"Is she being held somewhere? Is she being trafficked? Or is she deceased?" she added. "So it’s an emotional roller coaster because I don’t know."

Chelsea’s is among 216 open missing persons cases in New York City, according to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, a nationwide database run by the National Institute of Justice.

Those people have disappeared from every borough. They include infants and the elderly. Some were last contacted just a month ago. Others have been missing for decades. And they account for more than a third of the 623 open missing persons cases across New York State, the system’s figures show.

The third anniversary of Chelsea’s disappearance almost exactly aligns with the city’s Missing Persons Day event, which was held May 4. The biannual gathering, sponsored by the Office of Chief Medical Examiner, aims to aid the loved ones of missing people in their searches and connect them with resources that they might not know about.

The event has led to the identification of seven missing people in the metropolitan area since it started in 2014, according to the office, which is known as OCME. While the families who attend may have accepted that their missing loved one may no longer be alive, officials say, the event gives them some hope.

"I don’t want to use the word happy, but they see that they could find some kind of closure when they come here and see all the resources that they have here," said Yasser Hernandez, a criminalist at OCME. "… And some of them, actually, they just want someone else to tell their stories and someone who can listen to them."

Rose Cobo attended the last event in 2017, where she gave a DNA sample to the OCME. Cobo has also handed over samples from Chelsea's young son and other family members. This year she planned to bring some teeth from when Chelsea was young.

Samples from family members can help investigators identify human remains as missing people by comparing their DNA, officials say. Material from the missing person’s personal items like hairbrushes and toothbrushes can be even more effective, Hernandez said, as they allow the OCME to make a “direct comparison” between the sample and the office’s database.

"There’s still some people that, they don’t know that we do this job, and that’s what we’re trying to do — to have that information … so people can come to us and get the help that they deserve," said Veronica Cano, another OCME criminalist.

DNA is just one of the many tactics Cobo has used in her search for Chelsea, from blanketing Brooklyn neighborhoods with thousands of flyers to hiring private investigators to camping out in a subway station. It’s all in the pursuit of solving a mystery.

Chelsea’s 2016 disappearance capped a turbulent few months for the then-22-year-old mom, according to Rose, who is her biological aunt.

Chelsea’s biological mother had died in late February, less than a year after Chelsea gave birth to her son. Chelsea became emotionally overwhelmed and went to Coney Island Hospital for an evaluation in late March, Rose said.

Her roommate in the hospital was a woman who was struggling with a drug problem. The roommate had a male visitor and the three stayed in touch after Chelsea checked out on April 15.

Through the roommate, Chelsea fell into a crowd that got her hooked on opioids, Rose says. She went out one night in late April and returned unresponsive and bruised, according to her mother. "I’m sure she was robbed. I’m sure she was drugged. And I believe that she was also raped," Rose said.

About a week went by. Rose said Chelsea bought her a bear and some flowers for her birthday on May 4. Two days later, Rose recalled, she came to her mother and said, "I need help."

Rose brought Chelsea to Lutheran Hospital in Sunset Park, where a nurse practitioner recommended sending her to Yonkers to detox. She was brought there — only to be picked up later by the man who visited her and the roommate in the Coney Island hospital, Rose said.

Chelsea said that she was going to find a new program to help her the next day, according to Rose. The pair last spoke at 11:35 that night. Later, Rose got a message from the male visitor saying he had dropped her off back in Brooklyn. "With that my heart starts racing," Rose said.

"She never came home," she said. "It’s not like my daughter to not be in communication."

Rose is uncertain what happened to Chelsea. Her body has not been found if she is dead, Rose said, because it likely would have matched some DNA if it had been. It was thought at one point that she may have been ensnared by human trafficking, but the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office could not prove that was the case, Rose said.

“There’s not a second in my life or a blink in my eye that I don’t send positive energy out to the universe to allow Chelsea to either free herself or reveal herself,” Rose said.

In her absence, Rose has a piece of Chelsea in her son, whom Rose is raising with her life partner, Gina. The 3-year-old is a "spitting image" of his mother, Rose said — so much so that he sometimes makes her think she’s playing with Chelsea.

The boy knows Rose is his grandmother and he has an awareness of “mommy Chelsea,” as he calls her. But he reminds Rose not to be so sad.

"I have a feeling he actually might have saved my life, because without him, I don’t know — he gives me the strength to carry on," Rose said.

When Chelsea was a girl herself, she wrote Rose a poem for her 40th birthday listing 40 reasons why she loved her. One line resonates with Rose: "When I lose something I know you will be on the search."