SUGAR LAND, Texas — It’s been more than 2 months since anyone has seen Justin Urrutia, a 41-year-old Sugar Land man whose car was found abandoned last year, seven hours away in West Texas.
Justin's mother hasn't stopped her plea for help finding her son.
“Kind of a lot of waiting,” Vicki Urrutia said from the sofa of her son’s living room in Sugar Land. “A lot of waiting.”
Vicki lives only one block away from her son’s home. Together, they run Emerald Pools, which was founded by Vicki’s late husband decades ago.
On the evening of Monday, November 6, Vicki was walking her dog and dropped off some work shirts to Justin at his home. She said he was fine that night.
She then tried calling him the next morning.
“It’s very strange for it to go to voicemail, especially first thing in the morning, so I thought maybe he’s with a client," Vicki said. "So I continued to call, no answer, no answer."
It wasn’t until Vicki got a call from the Pecos County Sheriff’s Office, that she thought something bad must’ve happened to her son.
“Wednesday morning I get the call that they found his car,” Vicki said. “It’s seven hours away from here. It’s about 40 miles east of Fort Stockton on I-10, had veered off the road, crossed the service lane, broken through a pasture gate and was about 200 yards up the side of a mesa.”
Several of Justin’s possessions were left in the car.
“Phone was in the car, credit card and wallet was in the car, keys were in the car, a little bit of money was in the glove box,” Vicki said. “And no Justin.”
Nearly three months later, there's still no Justin, and there are only bits and pieces of information.
“It doesn’t make sense to me what he did,” Vicki says. “It makes more sense to me that someone took the car, or he gave the car to somebody to do this, or whatever.”
Using credit card receipts, Vicki has been able to construct a loose timeline of Justin’s route.
“His car gave the GPS to go to the icehouse in Seguin, Texas,” Vicki says. “That’s 155 miles – so two and a half hours there. Says it gets there right at 10.”
After that, Vicki said toll road receipts show he returned to Houston and was on the Sam Houston Tollway.
“Then I have gotten toll tags that have him back here on this side of town at like 12:34, so he’s over here on the Beltway with tags for about ten minutes,” Vicki said. “So that’s about 12:49 [a.m.].”
“Then the next thing, he’s back over in Seguin, and there’s a receipt for a Subway sandwich, that’s at 4 [a.m.],” Vicki said. “There’s also another Circle K that he visited for like $58. That seems to be where he might have gotten gas. After that, the next stop is up in San Antonio. There's a truck stop, Pilot store truck stop. Then he went to Kerrville and then out to Pecos.”
What Justin was doing that night, where he was going, and what happened to him, are questions nobody has been able to answer
“I’m just becoming more and more accustomed to the fact that I don’t know how this is going to turn out and I may not see or find him for a long time, if at all,” Vicki said.
Detectives working the case in Pecos County were not available on Friday.
Law enforcement said they were not able to find any evidence of a crime following an investigation in November, but until there is an answer, Justin's mother said she will not quit.
“Really and truly, until you find out one way or the other, you’ll never stop,” Vicki says. “You can’t stop.”