National Hispanic Heritage Month: Enrique Garibay Ruiz

In honor of National Hispanic Heritage Month I’m featuring a Hispanic missing person every day from September 15 to October 15. Today’s case is Enrique Garibay Ruiz, a 51-year-old who disappeared from Los Angeles, California on October 5, 2017. Two years ago, less a day.

Garibay Ruiz is originally from Mexico, and he traveled to Hungary for college and decided to stay. He lived there with his wife and two kids and had some pretty prestigious jobs: professor, nuclear physicist, mathematician and writer.

He went to Los Angeles for vacation and disappeared on the day he was supposed to fly back. He called his wife and said he was on standby for his return flight, but that doesn’t make sense to me — surely if that was the case, he would have returned his rental car, and he didn’t. In fact the car has never been found. So Garibay Ruiz was lying? If so, why?

He never made his flight and was never seen again. The last sign of him is on October 6, when his credit card was used at a restaurant.

From what I can see it looks like a voluntary disappearance, but it’s entirely on the cards that there’s a lot more going on here that I’m just unaware of.

2 thoughts on “National Hispanic Heritage Month: Enrique Garibay Ruiz

  1. missingmysteries October 5, 2019 / 1:05 am

    This comment is way OT, but here it is. All of it is about Jarvis Sayler. He MAY have been sighted in 2013. Hard to say.

    In 2015, Chris returned to a DOL office to explain the discrepancy. He said Jarvis was his twin brother and that was why the facial recognition system had triggered the photos. When it was pointed out that Jarvis and Chris are four years apart in age, Chris replied, “It is a rare situation, but it does occur.” Chris and Jarvis are not twins; in fact, they’re not even related. Chris was adopted.

    The issue was referred to the DOL’s License Integrity Unit for investigation, then sent to the Social Security Administration (SSA).

  2. Patricia November 28, 2019 / 12:13 pm


    I’m Enrique’s daughter.
    Thank you for writing this, I appreciate it!

    I would like to clarify some things though: firstly, he didn’t stay after college in Hungary, my parents studied in the US (doctorate) then moved to Mexico where I basically grew up, we only came to Hungary afterwards (my point is that he didn’t decide to stay after college, and he worked in Mexico)

    We don’t think that he went voluntarily missing, for several reasons. Many factors indicate that he might have been kidnapped or killed by someone. Investigators believe that he might be held by some illegal organization, as he is a physicist, although we obviously cannot know for sure.

    Remindig people of the missing is very important. Thank you very much for this!

    Kind regards,


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