With confirmation that 22-year-old Paulo Netto has been found drowned near Pier 48, the search is still on for the Frisco Five missing under ominously similar circumstances.
Brazilian-born Netto came to the city in October 2013 in order to explore art schools there. He vanished one night after placing a frantic call for help to his sister.
Police say they tracked the youth's cellphone but "no one was there" when they arrived shortly thereafter. They then began suggesting that Netto's "state of mind" must have been impaired somehow, although never elaborating on the reasons for their theory.
Paulo
Netto's missing persons case mirrors hundreds of "Smiley Face Killer"
ones accumulated nationwide over the past 16 years -- including a handful from the specific area he was visiting.
The west coast, however, is a recent hot spot for these kind of disappearances and drownings, having never before made it on the map.
So far there are five other missing young men in the California cluster since 2010, all of whom vanished without a trace and from the exact same San Francisco district:
1. The body of Derrick Shao, 20, washed ashore on November 7, 2013, eight days after the college student went missing;.
2. Nineteen-year-old Sean Sidi has been missing since May 21st of this year;
3. Shawn Dickerson, a 24-year-old, has been unaccounted for since 2011;
4. Businessman Cameron Remmer, 31, hasn't been heard from since
checking out of his hotel room in October 2011;
5. Jackson Miller, 23-years-old, likewise mysteriously disappeared in May of 2010;
The badly decomposed body of Paulo Netto was actually found floating in McCovey Cove last month, but it allegedly took all these weeks for the coroner to positively identify those remains.
His cause of death has not been released yet.