Unsolved: The quiet life and mysterious death of 'Panchito'

CHESAPEAKE

His friends called him Panchito. His life was not extraordinary, but his death was.

He came to the United States illegally from Honduras in 2006 and found odd jobs - landscaping lawns and working construction. He owned little more than a chair and the clothes he wore.

He lived with a group of people he did not know very well and who did not really know him: a couple and their children, a man named Lorenzo Lozaya who had traveled here from Mexico.

Even so, he called when he was not coming home - he spent a lot of time with friends at a trailer near the Virginia Beach Oceanfront.

Then one Friday night in November, he did not come home and did not call, and when Lozaya phoned him the next day, he didn't answer.

The phone did not ring at all the next time Lozaya tried, so he went to the trailer to try to find him.

He wasn't there, and he hadn't been in awhile.

Perhaps, Lozaya thought, he had returned to Honduras. He had talked about that, how one good month of work would give him the money needed for the return trip.

But jobs had dried up.

In the early afternoon of Nov. 20, a passer-by found a body and called the cops. It was off Douglas Road in Chesapeake, between U.S. 17 and the Dismal Swamp Canal, a narrow, short stretch of highway flanked by trees that bend into budding canopies.

The man had been dead at least a day, probably longer, said Bobby Hatchell, the primary detective on the case. Police declined to say how the man died, but it wasn't from natural causes. The man was Hispanic, in his late 20s or early 30s and carried no identification.

The only telling details were his clothing, and even that didn't offer much, a plaid shirt and jeans with a Rocawear belt buckle.

A fingerprint examiner ran the man's prints through a computer system and found nothing.

Police did not have one of the most basic pieces of information there is - the man's name.

"The first thing we do is learn as much about the victim as we can," said Hatchell, who has spent the past five years of his career investigating homicides.

The Police Department released a tightly cropped photo of the dead man's face to the media. It was an unusual decision.

Meanwhile, the fingerprint examiner, Bob Hasty, took the prints to the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System lab, the FBI's fingerprint and criminal history database.

Two days after the body was discovered, they learned who he was: Jose Francisco Rodriguez-Mancia, a 31-year-old from Honduras.

For quite a while, that was all police knew.

Only one picture hangs in the living room of the Virginia Beach townhouse where Rodriguez-Mancia lived with Lozaya, Hector Flores, Gisella Ornelas and their young children. It is "The Last Supper," and it is mounted high on a wall next to the kitchen. The furniture is striped; a small television sits in the corner; toys are stacked neatly on the hearth until little hands pull at them.

This is where Rodriguez-Mancia would watch soccer and soap operas and enjoy a beer - any kind of beer, Lozaya said through a translator.

The two met at work, and Rodriguez-Mancia moved into the townhouse in the spring of 2008. They would come home at the end of the day and talk about work, but Rodriguez-Mancia never shared much about himself: He had four children, maybe five, Lozaya said.

Ornelas thinks his wife had left him recently, leaving the kids with his mother.

Rodriguez-Mancia called home regularly, and sometimes his family phoned him from Honduras, a Central American country that is one of the poorest in the region. Lozaya thinks he was a laborer on a farm, and Rodriguez-Mancia had sent money back home for a time.

In late November, his family grew worried. They hadn't heard from him in awhile, and they couldn't reach him.

They began calling the townhouse.

Learning the dead man's name was a start. It also presented a new challenge.

Hatchell and Greyton Cintron, the second detective on the case, had no next of kin to notify, no address, no employer.

"We're trying to gather basic information," said Cintron, who is from Puerto Rico and speaks fluent Spanish.

"Where was he the last 24 to 72 hours? Where does he go to have a good time? Hopefully from that we can establish a motive."

Between him and Hatchell, they have two dozen years of law enforcement experience. They'd never had a case like this. It was as if Rodriguez-Mancia had lived and died invisibly.

There was another problem: the victim was in the U.S. illegally. His friends might be illegal too, Hatchell said, which could explain why no one had reported him missing.

If they'd heard his name or seen that tightly cropped photo in the media - unlikely, since the newspaper and news programs were in English - they still might not come forward, Cintron said. They might associate police with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and worry they'd be questioned about their status.

But Hatchell and Cintron were investigating a homicide. They wanted to know who killed Rodriguez-Mancia. Everything else was secondary.

They turned to a Spanish-language radio station, where Cintron did a live interview. That led them to the Virginia Beach townhouse.

Rodriguez-Mancia hadn't left for Honduras after all, Lozaya learned. He'd been killed, his body left on a lonely stretch of highway in rural Chesapeake.

It was a sad thing, Lozaya said.

He could offer the detectives little information - just that his roommate hadn't come home one day. His things were still in a room he'd had to himself. The clothes. Some papers. Some pictures.

Most were group shots but there was one of Rodriguez-Mancia by himself: He is standing in front of a paneled wall and a row of small, artificial trees wearing a white Merrill Lynch T-shirt and a cross around his neck. His hands rest on his hips, and if he smiles, it is ever so slight. The necklace catches the light.

The detectives left with the photograph.

Their investigation took them to the Oceanfront and to the trailers. Some people recognized him.

"That's Panchito," they'd say, referring to the Spanish nickname for Francisco. Or, "That's Chico."

Rodriguez-Mancia had gone by many names. Sometimes he went by Rodriguez. Sometimes it was both. Hatchell and Cintron wondered if that was to avoid being detected. He'd certainly done a good job of it.

Still, there was a fellow Honduran - Rodriguez-Mancia's best friend - who might know something, the detectives learned.

But he'd lived here illegally, too, and was deported a week before his friend's slaying.

Rodriguez-Mancia's mother and sister still had not heard from him.

They called again after the detectives visited, and it fell to Flores to tell them what had happened.

They cried and screamed, Ornelas said through a translator. They could not believe it. What about his body, they asked. Could they send it back to Honduras?

The three immigrants couldn't afford it.

The women kept calling. They stopped answering.

Eventually, the Honduran consulate in Washington arranged to send Rodriguez-Mancia's body back.

His roommates got rid of his chair and the other things the detectives didn't take, leaving the room like it was before he came, as if he'd never been there at all.

Kristin Davis, (757) 222-5555, kristin.davis@pilotonline.com