Family and friends leading the search for missing Patterson man discover his body

In the 35 days that Luis Angel Navarro Soto was missing, his family felt they were alone in their search for him.

Five weeks after he went missing and three weeks after his Honda Civic was recovered off of a field along the Mokelumne River, Navarro Soto’s boss, uncle and cousin were the ones to locate his body.

The 30-year-old father went missing Aug. 17 after he dropped his father off at a house party in Lodi where their band was playing and went back to his parents’ home to get cables they needed for the show.

His wife last heard from him around 7 p.m., when he called her to say he’d been in a crash but that he was in an area with a lot of trees and grass and that he would walk out to a road, said his cousin’s wife, Liliana Gamboa. The phone went dead in the middle of the conversation, she said.

“They kept calling and calling him but he never picked up,” Gamboa said Tuesday.

The Lodi Police Department took a missing persons report from Navarro Soto’s sister the following morning, said Lt. Fernando Martinez. He said Navarro Soto was entered into a missing person database and officers were notified to be on the lookout for him and his Honda Civic.

Lodi police later forwarded the case to Stanislaus County sheriff’s deputies in Patterson, where Navarro Soto lived with his wife and daughter, Guadalupe, who turned 5 on Sept. 1.

On Aug. 31, Navarro Soto’s Honda was found by a beekeeper along the Mokelumne River, according to California Highway Patrol Officer Ruben Jones.

The Honda had crashed into a group of beehive boxes. The windshield was cracked and the front bumper was detached. Navarro Soto’s cell phone was in the car.

Gamboa said family went to the site not long after and walked around the area, finding Navarro Soto’s knife, a mirror from the vehicle, car keys and cash in the field and along the riverbank.

She said family returned to the area repeatedly without help from law enforcement to search for more signs of him.

“If we would have given up searching, we never would have found him,” Gamboa said.

Navarro Soto was a field worker who drove a tractor for a grape farmer.

His boss bought an underwater camera to search the river for him and on Saturday went there with Navarro Soto’s cousin and uncle, Gamboa said.

She said they launched a boat near the area where the Honda was found and about two miles downstream found Navarro Soto’s body floating in the river.

Sgt. Josh Clayton of the Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Department said the Department received the missing persons report from Lodi on Aug. 20 and a deputy immediately started contacting area coroner’s facilities for people matching Navarro Soto’s description and ran a search of police contacts on his vehicle.

A detective was assigned the case on Aug. 22 and authored a search warrant for Navarro Soto’s phone to get the general area of its last known location in Acampo. Deputies from the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Department searched the area on foot and drone flyovers were done several times but his vehicle was not located until later.

Stanislaus County Sheriff’s deputies also searched the area of other locations Navarro Soto went to or could have gone to based on statements from the family, Clayton said.

The San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Department did the autopsy on Navarro Soto. Deputy Andrea Lopez said they are awaiting toxicology results before an official cause of death can be determined.

This story was originally published September 24, 2019 at 4:11 PM.