Frank and Edgar Sanchez went missing in 2001 and never were found. Their disappearance haunts family members.

A white 1992 Chevrolet Lumina was parked in a "No Parking" zone on Grand Street in Manhattan's Chinatown on Aug. 31, 2001.

For days, the vehicle never moved. It sat in front of a six-story tenement building, collecting multiple tickets and gathering dust following the collapse of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, after the terrorist attack that killed thousands in lower Manhattan.

Brothers Frank and Edgar Sanchez had climbed into Frank's Lumina sedan at his home in Baldwin for one last time at around 9:15 p.m. on Aug. 30, 2001. They went for a ride to a friend's auto body and repair shop in West Babylon, family members said. But the brothers never returned and were never seen again.

Almost 25 years after they drove away that night, the mystery of what happened to the Sanchez brothers has only deepened after Sept. 11 sharply focused the world's attention on finding the masterminds of the nation's worst terrorist attack.

"I personally feel that since Sept. 11 happened, after the disappearance of my dad and my uncle, that the investigation of their disappearance took a back seat and wasn't a priority," said Frank Sanchez's youngest daughter, Vivienne Maldonado, 41, of Baldwin.

“This was a time when there was no social media, very few people had cellphones,” Edgar’s daughter, Janice Sanchez, said about the difficulties in getting news of the disappearances to the public. “It was not like it was out there in the public.”

An unexplained disappearance

The disappearance of Frank, 54, and Edgar, 44, of Flushing, Queens, has haunted their families ever since, relatives said. Because they were last seen in Baldwin, the Nassau County Police Department started a missing persons investigation but has admitted over the years — in court records reviewed by Newsday — that the police hit a dead end. There was no evidence the men’s bank accounts had been emptied, and interviews with family and friends turned up no useful information. Family members said the car found in Chinatown had no fingerprints from unknown persons and no blood evidence.

Frustrated by what she said was a lack of updates from police, Maldonado is leading a family crusade to keep the case in public view and prod police to do more. Maldonado, her sister Janine Sanchez, 43, and cousin Janice Sanchez, 36, spoke with Newsday recently with the hope that publicity about the case might jog the memory of a potential witness, or better yet prompt someone who knows what happened to the men to come forward with new information.

“The goal is to find out what happened to them, because it has been 24 years, painful years,” Maldonado said.

Family members recalled how the brothers left the home Frank shared with his wife and three adult children for what they said would be a visit to a friend who ran a high-performance auto body and repair shop in West Babylon.

After a cup of coffee and saying their goodbyes, the two men got into Frank’s Lumina and left. The trip east into Suffolk County should have taken about a half-hour in light nighttime traffic. Family members remembered Edgar giving everyone a kiss and a hug, but Frank seemed uncharacteristically agitated, under pressure, and didn’t give his usual goodbye kiss.

When the two men didn’t return home as expected, their families called the body shop owner, Matthew Grillo, who, according to Surrogate Court records, told family members Frank and Edgar never arrived. Frank’s frantic wife, Joan, then called the police.

'Open to any possibility'

Compounding the mysterious disappearance, relatives said, was the fact that Frank’s car eventually was found in Chinatown in Manhattan. The Grand Street location was well over an hour’s drive from their ostensible destination of West Babylon and about 45 minutes from the Sanchez home in Baldwin.

The Sanchez brothers, although they had loving families and between them fathered 10 children, had lives filled with risk and danger. Both court records and news accounts indicate they were connected to some of the most notorious Mafia and Southeast Asian heroin traffickers in New York history. The result was that both Frank and Edgar found themselves in trouble with the law, facing arrest and, in the case of Frank, spending over two years in federal prison.

Their families insist that after their run-ins with the Drug Enforcement Administration and federal prosecutors, Frank and Edgar lived changed, decent lives. Frank was a professional race car driver and Edgar ran an auto body shop and car wash in Brooklyn. But the relatives still harbor the nagging suspicion that perhaps the old dealings of the Sanchez brothers somehow resurfaced and ensnared them.

“Honestly, I think we are all open to any possibility,” Janice said. “They previously were convicted of crimes and served time and ... really started fresh and new. So what that did was enable them to pay their debt [to society]. But that doesn’t put an end to anything that may have been kind of hanging around from the past.”

Federal court records showed Frank and Edgar Sanchez were arrested on heroin charges in 1994, along with their cousin Charles Galletti, of Puerto Rico and New York. News reports of the charges said the heroin traced from Southeast Asia, which in the late 1980s and early 1990s became a major source of the drug coming into the United States, sometimes through overseas networks of Chinese smugglers.

In 1995, Frank Sanchez pleaded guilty to federal drug charges and received a sentence of 30 months in prison from then-Manhattan U.S. District Judge Sonia Sotomayor, now a U.S. Supreme Court justice. Galletti also pleaded guilty to federal drug charges, and Sotomayor sentenced him to 4 years in prison. The case against Edgar Sanchez was dropped. Galletti didn’t return telephone requests for comment.

If the previous drug dealings of the Sanchez brothers had something to do with their disappearance, as Janice Sanchez thinks is possible, the discovery of the car in Chinatown might be a tantalizing clue. Grand Street is in the heart of Chinatown, at the time the turf of major Asian gangs, and just blocks away from Little Italy, the area where crime families operated.

Frustrating pace

Members of the Sanchez family have been frustrated by the pace of the NCPD investigation and the lack of regular feedback from police. .

Frank’s son, Frank Sanchez Jr., filed a petition in Nassau County Surrogate's Court in 2004 to have his father legally declared dead. That finally happened in 2010. Edgar’s family has not filed a comparable action for a death declaration in Nassau County Surrogate's Court.

The NCPD eventually filed a letter in June 2010, submitted to the Surrogate's Court, that indicated after an examination of the case file that the missing persons probe was stalled.

“The file indicates that in addition to reinterviewing family, friends and associates he [the detective] examined the financial records of [the Sanchez brothers] and did not identify any information that assisted in locating either individual,” wrote NCPD Det. Kenneth M. Smith. “There have not been any leads generated regarding this case of several years.”

While DNA was initially taken from hairbrushes used by the two missing men, as well as cheek swab samples from family members, Janice Sanchez said the family finally contacted the New York City Medical Examiner's Office to provide additional genetic samples from family members for submission to CODIS, the national DNA database run by the FBI. CODIS is actually a number of law enforcement DNA databases: one for missing persons and another for unidentified human remains.

There is no guarantee human remains will be found to make the appropriate comparisons. Seasoned investigators said the remains of homicide victims can be challenging to recover.

“These cases are extremely difficult to solve,” said Joseph Giacalone, former commander of the NYPD's cold case squad in the Bronx. “That is why it is important for law enforcement to put these cases out to the public.”

Will never stop looking

The case of the Sanchez brothers is among some 50 missing persons from Nassau County filed with the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs) established by the National Institute of Justice. Inclusion of the cases in NamUs expands the number of law enforcement agencies that could help make DNA comparisons with jurisdictions beyond Nassau County.

Maldonado hopes renewed publicity about the case might get someone to come forward before it is too late to develop leads.

“If this doesn’t happen in the next year or two, the people involved — no one would be alive and there is never going to be any answer,” Maldonado said. “Maybe somebody who was scared to not talk is willing to. … Sometimes people’s lives change.”

Giacalone said historically cold cases have been solved by prisoner debriefings, deathbed confessions or a hotline tip such as occurred in 2013 to solve the celebrated Manhattan case of Baby Hope, the young girl known as Angelica Castillo, murdered in 1991.

“The technology that exists today didn’t exist 25 years ago,” said former NYPD deputy commissioner Stephen Davis, who worked several homicide cases and said families should not lose hope. “How many Mafia hits have never been solved, until someone gives it up years later?"

The process of reviving interest in the case has been a challenge, but Maldonado, her siblings and cousins are committed.

“Being a child of a missing person is really tough,” Maldonado said. “I beg and I pray that anyone who knows anything would please come forward with any sort of information they know because it would really give us peace of mind."

Janice Sanchez said the families will press for answers, even if it takes another quarter century.

“They have missed the births of over three dozen grandchildren, and they deserve to be brought home,” she said. “We will never stop looking for them — never stop until we bring them home in some capacity.”