The Other Missing Mother: Evelyn Hernandez and Her Son Alex

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

June 14, 2025

Alexis Geraldo Hernandez, known to his family as Alex, was five years old in the spring of 2002, living with his mother Evelyn in the Crocker-Amazon neighborhood of San Francisco, California. Evelyn had immigrated to the United States from El Salvador at fourteen years old and became pregnant with Alex when she was just seventeen. By 2002 she had built a working life in the city, having held jobs at the Clift Royal Sonesta Hotel and at Costco, and by that spring she was twenty four years old, a single mother raising her young son and roughly six days away from giving birth to a second child, a boy she and the baby's father had already decided to name Fernando.

The father of that unborn child was a man named Herman Aguilera, thirty six years old, who worked as a mechanic connected to the airline industry, or by some accounts a limousine company. Evelyn's relationship with Aguilera had taken a difficult turn in the months before her due date. According to later reporting, she discovered that Aguilera was married only after she called his mother to talk through his reluctance about the pregnancy, learning in that conversation what he had apparently kept from her the entire time they were together. Aguilera's wife reportedly knew about his relationship with Evelyn but did not know about the pregnancy, a tangle of secrecy that would end up mattering a great deal once Evelyn disappeared.

A Wallet, a Gutter, and a Wall of Silence

On May 1, 2002, Evelyn dropped Alex off at day care and used an ATM machine, ordinary errands on an ordinary day. The evening before, she had spoken with her boyfriend and with her sisters about plans for an upcoming baby shower, nothing in the conversation suggesting a woman preparing to vanish. Neither Evelyn nor Alex returned home that night, and for reasons that have never been fully explained, an entire week passed before anyone reported them missing. It was Evelyn's boyfriend who finally contacted police on May 7, 2002, six days after the two of them were last confirmed to have been seen.

Investigators who examined Evelyn's apartment at 224 Lowell Street found nothing that suggested a struggle or a violent confrontation inside the home itself. San Francisco Police Inspector Holly Pera later described the scene plainly, saying it did not look like there had been any kind of struggle, and that everything about the apartment suggested Evelyn had expected to come back. Days after she vanished, her wallet turned up discarded in a gutter in South San Francisco, in a location near where Aguilera worked, still containing a disability check and forty dollars in cash, an odd detail for anyone to abandon if robbery had been the motive.

Remains Beneath the Bay Bridge

The case remained an active missing persons investigation for nearly three months, until July 24, 2002, when a badly decomposed body, missing its head and limbs and still clothed in maternity wear, washed ashore in San Francisco Bay near the Embarcadero and Folsom Street, beneath the Bay Bridge. It took investigators until September to confirm through DNA testing what many had already feared, that the remains belonged to Evelyn Hernandez. Her full term, unborn son Fernando was never recovered, and neither was Alex, her five year old, who had vanished alongside her and has never been seen again in the more than two decades since.

Investigators questioned Herman Aguilera extensively in the months following Evelyn's disappearance. He initially cooperated with police, but at some point retained an attorney and stopped communicating with investigators altogether, with his wife reportedly providing an alibi for his whereabouts. Despite the intensity of the early scrutiny directed at him, San Francisco police have never formally named Aguilera a suspect or even a person of interest in the case, and he was last interviewed by investigators in August 2002. More than twenty years later, no one has ever been arrested or charged in connection with Evelyn's death, and Alex's whereabouts remain a complete mystery.

A Case the Country Never Noticed

What makes Evelyn Hernandez's case especially striking, and what has driven renewed attention to it in recent years, is how closely it mirrors a case that became one of the most famous American crime stories of the early 2000s. Just seven months after Evelyn disappeared, another pregnant woman named Laci Peterson vanished from her home in Modesto, California, in December 2002. Laci's remains, like Evelyn's, eventually washed ashore missing limbs, and the body of her unborn son Conner was recovered a day before hers was. Laci's husband, Scott Peterson, was ultimately convicted of murdering her and their unborn child, in a case that generated nonstop cable news coverage, bestselling books, and eventually multiple television dramatizations.

Evelyn's case received almost none of that attention. She was a legal immigrant and a single mother, working hourly jobs in a city far larger and more anonymous than Modesto, and her disappearance came and went in the local news cycle without ever breaking through to the national consciousness the way Laci Peterson's did. The gap in coverage was not just a matter of impression either. The San Francisco Chronicle, the paper of record in Evelyn's own city, published thirty two separate stories about Laci Peterson between her disappearance and Scott Peterson's eventual arrest, while running only four stories total about Evelyn and Alex, not one of which ever made the front page. The disparity has become its own subject of scrutiny in true crime coverage in the years since, with commentators and documentarians pointing to the case as an example of which victims get sustained public interest, extensive investigative resources, and lasting cultural memory, and which do not. ABC News Studios examined the pairing directly in its docuseries Murder Has Two Faces, hosted by Robin Roberts, which paired Evelyn's story with Laci Peterson's specifically to highlight how differently the two cases were treated by media and, by extension, by the public.

Still Open, Still Waiting

The Evelyn and Alex Hernandez case remains active within the San Francisco Police Department's cold case unit, carried today under case number 20549157. The city's mayor's office has authorized a hundred thousand dollar reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of whoever is responsible for Evelyn's death and Alex's disappearance, a reward that has stood, unclaimed, for more than two decades. Investigators have said publicly that they continue to hold out hope that advances in DNA technology, the same kind of forensic progress that has cracked open other cold cases decades after the fact, might eventually provide the break this one has never gotten.

Alex Hernandez, if he is alive today, would be an adult in his late twenties, old enough to have lived most of his life apart from the mother who dropped him off at day care one morning in May 2002 and then vanished along with him before either of them could be seen again. His mother's partial remains came home to her family in the most painful way possible, recovered from the water beneath a bridge that thousands of people cross every day without a second thought for what once washed up beneath it. Alex and his unborn brother Fernando never came home at all, and San Francisco investigators, more than twenty years on, are still waiting for the case to finally break.

Anyone with information about the case is asked to contact San Francisco Police Inspector Daniel Dedet at 415-553-1450, or the department's anonymous tip line at 415-575-4444.

Sources