Boris De La Ossa Missing Person Case

Boris De La Ossa was 78 years old when he disappeared from Phoenix, Arizona, on June 21, 2021. The elderly man was last seen in the area of North 12th Street and East Maryland Avenue, a residential part of central Phoenix. What made his absence especially concerning was what followed: Boris stopped having contact with the people around him. Friends and neighbors who ordinarily might have expected to see or hear from him had no further contact with him after that day. Public missing-person information offered no detailed explanation for where he might have intended to go, whether he had made plans to leave the neighborhood, or what may have happened after he was last observed. His disappearance therefore began with relatively few clues—an elderly man seen in his Phoenix neighborhood and then an unexplained silence that continued long enough for concern about his safety and whereabouts to grow.

Information circulated during the search described Boris as a male of Hispanic/Latino and White/Caucasian background. He had black hair and brown eyes and was relatively slight in build, standing approximately 5 feet 6 inches to 5 feet 8 inches tall and weighing between about 140 and 150 pounds. His missing-person case was entered under NamUs case number MP94613, allowing his identifying information and photographs to be distributed beyond the immediate Phoenix area. Those photographs became particularly important because the publicly available notices contained only a limited account of the circumstances surrounding his disappearance. The notices reviewed did not provide a description of the clothing he was wearing when he was last seen, identify a vehicle connected with his disappearance, or describe a destination he was believed to be traveling toward. Investigators and anyone attempting to recognize him were therefore left largely with his photographs, physical characteristics, the location of his last known sighting, and the knowledge that he had unexpectedly fallen out of contact with friends and neighbors.

As the case remained public, Boris's name appeared among Arizona's missing persons, with the circumstances consistently returning to the same troubling point: he had been seen around North 12th Street and East Maryland Avenue in Phoenix and afterward had not been in contact with the people who knew him. There is little publicly available information describing the investigative steps that followed, and no reliable public account provides a detailed chronology of searches, possible sightings, or other developments that may have occurred while authorities worked to determine what had happened to him. That lack of detail means it would be misleading to reconstruct events that have never been publicly documented. What can be said is that his disappearance involved an older man whose sudden loss of contact was significant enough to result in a formal missing-person investigation and national database entry, while the limited information available to the public left many of the circumstances surrounding his absence unanswered.

Official case records were ultimately updated to show that Boris De La Ossa was located alive, bringing his period as a missing person to an end. The exact date on which he was located and the circumstances surrounding his recovery have not been publicly detailed in the information available, so no specific recovery date can responsibly be given. There is likewise no public information establishing where he had been during the period in which he was missing or explaining why he had stopped communicating with neighbors and friends. His case is therefore no longer considered an active missing-person case, and the uncertainty that began when the 78-year-old vanished from his Phoenix neighborhood ultimately ended with the welcome news that he had survived. In overview, Boris's case began with his unexplained disappearance from the North 12th Street and East Maryland Avenue area, continued through a period in which investigators and the public had only limited clues about his whereabouts, and concluded with him being found alive—an outcome that brought relief even though many details about what happened during his absence remain private or publicly unknown.
Last Seen: Jun 21, 2021