A 19-year-old Ecuadorian immigrant disappeared on June 14 after denouncing that some people who had offered her a job as a waitress in Atlanta (Georgia) actually wanted her to prostitute herself in a hotel. This Monday she was found dead in that city, according to what her family reported to Telemundo News.
Saraí Llanos Gómez was the mother of two children, ages 1 and 3, who stayed in Guayaquil when she traveled to the United States on August 22, 2021 with a tourist visa and the hope of finding a better life for herself and her family, according to the ecuadorian media Extra.
Initially he settled in his godfather’s house in Chicago (Illinois), where he worked in various restaurants and in a food truck. But she was offered a job as a waitress in Atlanta, with which, they told her, she would earn a lot of money, according to her mother, Gardenia Gómez.
The young woman arrived in Atlanta on June 10 but discovered that the job was not what she promised: “One day before her disappearance she told me: ‘Mommy, a Russian has hired me as a waitress in a hotel,’ but the next day she told me that she had argued with that lady because it was not the job she had been promised and that it was to keep men company. My daughter was upset,” the woman told Extra.
Llanos assured that he had threatened his boss with denouncing her for running a sex trafficking network, his mother said. On June 14, she last communicated with her mother, who lives in Ecuador, through WhatsApp. From then on she lost track of her.
“He wrote me: ‘Mommy, I’m going to eat pizza and watch TV on my cell phone.’ Right away she sent me a photo of the hotel room where she was staying. It was the last I heard from my little girl. I don’t know what to tell the children, they ask for their mother,” Gómez told the newspaper.
[Una mujer desapareció hace cuatro años en Colorado. Su cuerpo ha sido hallado en una alcantarilla de su casa]
Given the lack of news, her mother contacted The Russian: “He told me not to worry. that my daughter was a sleepyhead and had surely fallen asleep. The next day, without mincing words, he told me: ‘Don’t worry, she must have left with a man, tomorrow they’ll dump her in some hotel. And don’t file complaints because that won’t do you any good.”
His family reported his disappearance to the authorities. The Ecuadorian consul in Atlanta was notified on June 28 through the Foreign Ministry of his country and alerted the Atlanta police, according to Extra.
The police found the young woman’s passport in the hotel where she was staying, the diplomat, Juan Veintimilla, explained to the local Telemundo News station in Atlanta.
This Monday, her mother received a call informing her that her daughter had been found dead “near a lake.”
Gómez is now looking for a way to travel to Atlanta to clarify what happened to his daughter. Noticias Telemundo contacted the police and immigration authorities, but they did not offer details about the case.