Around midday, Facundo called his mother, Cristina Castro. The words she remembers are the kind a parent never forgets: "Mom, you have no idea where I am. You'll never see me again." That morning, two officers of the Buenos Aires Provincial Police from Mayor Buratovich had stopped him and written him a ticket for breaking the lockdown. They photographed him beside their truck, the image that would later become the symbol of the whole case. Witnesses said they saw him again that afternoon near Teniente Origone, where officers in a pickup with its rear door open appeared to tell him to climb in. After that, nothing. His phone sent its last signals that evening, one of them from the petrochemical zone outside Bahía Blanca, and then went silent.

Cristina Castro became the heart of the search, and she pushed against every obstacle. She said the police made the report difficult to file, that they once noted a witness statement on a scrap of deli paper, that officers blocked her with trucks when she tried to observe a search. As the provincial police themselves fell under suspicion, they were removed from the investigation. Federal forces took over. Human rights figures who had spent decades searching for Argentina's disappeared rallied to the family: Estela de Carlotto called Facundo "a disappeared person in democracy," and Nobel laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel joined the case. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights issued a protective measure. Even the President of Argentina said publicly: "We need to know what happened to Facundo."

For weeks, hundreds of searchers combed the scrubland along Route 3. At their peak, 200 members of the federal police, naval prefecture, and national gendarmerie crossed the country on foot and by air. Divers searched channels; dogs worked the fields; drones flew overhead. On 15 August 2020, in a marshy area between General Daniel Cerri and Villarino Viejo, they found human remains in an advanced state of decomposition. They were Facundo's. The autopsy was performed by the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, the same experts who had spent decades identifying victims of the country's dictatorship, in a laboratory at the former ESMA. Fifteen specialists worked for ten hours. They found algae in the body matching the site where he was discovered.

The forensic report established the cause of death as drowning. But the manner of death, whether homicide, suicide, or accident, could not be determined. That uncertainty became its own kind of wound. The investigating judge moved toward a theory of accidental death; the family rejected it absolutely. "My son did not commit suicide or have an accident," Cristina Castro said. "The Buenos Aires Police killed him." An appeals court later removed the judge from the case, finding the family's mistrust of her reasonable. Four provincial officers fell under suspicion over shifting and contradictory statements and deleted phone messages, but prosecutors held that the evidence did not support charging them. Years on, no one has been convicted. What is certain is the loss: a young man on his way to ask for a second chance, gone, and a family still waiting for the truth.