‘Waiting too long.’ Missing Warner Robins man’s family faces holidays with no answers
This holiday season one Warner Robins family is left with the angst of not knowing what happened to their loved one.
More than three months have passed since Jesus Mancilla-Velez vanished after driving away from his Red Fox Run mobile home Sept. 5, the Saturday before Labor Day.
His black 2015 Chevrolet Tahoe was found later that day abandoned in bushy overgrowth at the edge of a wooded area off a dirt road in Crawford County.
The GBI suspects foul play.
‘We’ve been waiting too long’
“When we get together, everybody still crying,” his brother Leo Mancilla said. “But we have to be strong. Sometimes it’s hard to believe he’s not here with us. But everybody has to be strong and live our lives, too. It’s hard.”
Family members expressed frustration over not having concrete answers from investigators. Lizbeth Mancilla wonders if GBI agents are still pressing hard to find out what happened to her brother-in-law.
“We’ve been waiting too long and we don’t have answers yet,” she said. “I don’t know if the GBI is working so slow or because they don’t have any answers or nobody wants to talk. I don’t know.”
Whenever they reach out to the GBI, the answer seems to be the same, family members said.
“Every time we send an email, I feel like it’s the same thing,” Leo Mancilla said. “It’s always the same answer: ‘We’re still working hard.’ ... But I feel like sometimes there’s no hope ... For us, it’s like, same answer, same answer; just sometimes so frustrating.”
‘We have some new leads’
Todd Crosby, special agent in charge of the GBI’s Region 13 Office in Perry, said, “If they think that we are not actively pursuing this investigation, they are sorely wrong.”
He declined to elaborate on the investigation.
“We have some new leads that we are actively running, and we have people still calling and giving us information that we’re running on a daily basis,” Crosby said. “But as far as releasing what we’re running and what we’re working on, I’m not going to do that because this is an active, ongoing investigation and I don’t want anything to interfere with that.”
‘We just want to find him’
Described as a kind, beautiful soul by his friends and family, Mancilla-Velez, a native of Mexico, has worked as a server at El Jalisciense Mexican Restaurant on Ga. 96 in Kathleen for the past 10 years. Formerly married, Mancilla-Velez has two daughters, who live in Arizona with their mother, and a small dog named Missy.
A neighbor washing their car saw Mancilla-Velez get in his pickup and drive away from his home between 9 and 10 a.m. the day he went missing. Although his pickup was found several hours later abandoned in the grassy area off Rowland Road, investigators learned that it was first spotted there by a nearby resident about 11:30 a.m.
Mancilla-Velez was known to be active on dating apps and was likely carrying as much as $1,000 in cash, including his monthly vehicle payment, on him the day he vanished, his family said.
A $5,000 reward is being offered through Macon Regional Crimestoppers for information leading to the arrest of person(s) responsible for his disappearance. Tipsters to Crimestoppers may remain anonymous.
“We think two ways: the good way and the bad way,” Leo Mancilla said. “We think, you know, sometimes he’s already dead and we just need to find his body, and sometimes we just thinking somebody maybe kidnapped him and still have him and we still believe we can find him alive.
“But you know we have to think both ways because already a long time. We just want to find him. I mean, bad or good way, we just want to find him so we can have a peace. So he can have a peace, too.”
If anyone has any information related to Mancilla-Velez’s disappearance, please contact Macon Regional Crimestoppers at 877-68CRIME, or at crimestop.us, or the GBI Tip Line at 1-800-597-8477 or https://gbi.georgia.gov/submit-tips-online.
This story was originally published December 21, 2020 at 5:00 AM.