The disappearance of Priscila, who is the sister of the famous Brazilian fighter Vitor Belfort, shocked the country and sparked a battle for answers by the Belfort family. The case helped change the way the police deal with disappearances, but to this day, Priscila’s whereabouts have not been discovered.
This Wednesday (25), the Disney+ streaming platform launches ‘Volta Priscila’, a four-episode documentary series that promises to examine in detail the investigation and the twists and turns surrounding the young woman’s disappearance.
Priscila Belfort was 29 years old and worked at the Municipal Department of Sports and Leisure of Rio de Janeiro, located on Avenida Presidente Vargas, in the city center, when she went out for lunch during work hours on January 9, 2004. Since then, she was never seen again .
Remember the case
- January 2004:
On Friday, January 9, 2004, Priscila Belfort woke up with cramps and feeling unwell. Her mother, Jovita Belfort, gave her a ride to work, in a building belonging to the Rio de Janeiro Municipal Department of Sports and Leisure, on Avenida Presidente Vargas, in downtown Rio.
According to the investigation, Priscila arrived at the office around 11 am and made a few phone calls. An employee of the building where she worked saw her walking absent-mindedly around 1 pm on Avenida Marechal Floriano, near Presidente Vargas. That was the last time she was seen.
According to Jovita, Priscila had little money, no bank cards and her cell phone was dead. That night, Vitor Belfort filed a police report about his sister’s disappearance at the 14th Police Precinct (Leblon).
On Saturday, the 10th, the Belfort family and friends began to take turns and search non-stop for Priscila on the streets of all regions of the city of Rio de Janeiro.
At the time, Vitor Belfort was already a well-known fighter in Brazil, and had just married Joana Prado, who played the dancing character ‘Feiticeira’ on Brazilian TV show. As a result, the affair quickly gained great repercussion in the press.
In the following days, friends and relatives began distributing pamphlets with Priscila’s photo and the numbers for the Disque Denúncia hotline. Dozens of billboards were placed around the city.
At the time, Disque Denúncia received the first calls about the case, but no concrete leads were found. Teams from the 14th DP began searching hospitals and the IML (Forensic Medical Institute).
The police began to consider the disappearance a possible crime of extortion through kidnapping and the case began to be handled by the Anti-Kidnapping Police Station (DAS). However, the family did not receive any ransom demand.
A public event appealing for information and attended by celebrities such as Bernardinho, Eri Johnson, Márcio Garcia and Mario Gomes is organized by the Belfort family. The event features the first use of the “Come Back, Priscila” t-shirt. In a statement broadcast nationwide, the family asks the public to stop sending false clues.
Rio’s Civil Police then began searches in other states after dozens of calls received by Disque Denúncia, but no hypothesis has been made and no line of investigation has been formed. Family and friends say they have no idea what could have happened.
In Las Vegas, Vitor Belfort wins the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) light heavyweight belt, 22 days after his sister disappeared. “I was only thinking about her when I got into the ring,” he said at the time.
- May 2004:
The Civil Police have been unable to make progress on the case, and Disque Denúncia will start offering a reward of R$5,000 for tips leading to Priscila in early May. This is the first time that a missing person has been rewarded for reports in the city of Rio de Janeiro.
- July 2004:
Dão, the drug lord of Morro da Providência, a community in the central region of Rio, is arrested. At first, there are indications that the gang he leads may be involved in Priscila’s disappearance. However, five days later he is released due to lack of evidence.
- September 2004:
The Civil Police are carrying out an operation in Morro da Providência, searching for a disused garage where Priscila would be, according to multiple calls received by Disque Denúncia. However, the agents do not find any trace of the young woman at the location.
- December 2004:
The 127th Police Precinct (Búzios), in the Lagos region, receives an anonymous tip claiming that the body of a woman found charred in a car is that of Priscila. A few weeks later, the Disque Denúncia hotline receives the same information.
- April 2005:
The family carried out DNA tests to find out if the body found was really that of Priscila, but the result was negative.
Case without conclusion
Over the past 20 years, several hypotheses have been put forward about Priscila’s disappearance. The police initially followed the line of investigation that she was a possible kidnapping, and then that drug traffickers had killed the young woman. This hypothesis arose after rumors spread that she might be a drug user, information that was always denied by her family and that was never proven.
Jovita Belfort, Priscila’s mother, became an activist against the invisibility of missing persons. Because of her activism, the Rio de Janeiro Civil Police began to have a Missing Persons Discovery Unit (DDPA) in its structure in 2014, so that missing persons cases would not be handled by homicide or kidnapping police stations.
With the help of Jovita, who held the position of superintendent of Prevention and Confrontation of Disappearances of Persons at the State Secretariat for Social Development and Human Rights of Rio de Janeiro, the state created the ‘Alerta Pri’ system in March 2022.
The tool was a system, operated by the Civil Police, that sent an alert to the phones of registered people every time a child or teenager disappeared in the state. The message contained the name, age, physical characteristics, location of the disappearance and other pertinent information.
During the period in which the project was active, 27 of the 30 missing children in the state were found. However, in June of the same year, the project was interrupted due to a lack of agreement between the government and the telephone companies. According to the Belfort family, the companies did not want to cover the costs of the messages.
Twenty years later, Priscila remains among the more than 80,000 Brazilians who have disappeared in the country, according to data from this year’s Public Security Yearbook.
According to the Belfort family, the investigation into the case was shelved, but was reopened about two years ago, due to the recording of the Disney+ series.
In a note to CNN the Rio State Civil Police Secretariat (Sepol) stated that it sympathizes with the family’s pain and that, from the very beginning, all available resources were used to elucidate the case and clarify Priscila’s whereabouts.
“Numerous investigations were carried out and several lines of investigation were checked. It is worth noting that all complaints related to the case were and continue to be exhaustively investigated by the Anti-Kidnapping Police Station (DAS),” the note concludes.
This content was originally published in Remember the case of Priscila Belfort, who disappeared 20 years ago and is the subject of a series that premieres today on the CNN Brasil website.
Source: CNN Brasil
I’m James Harper, a highly experienced and accomplished news writer for World Stock Market. I have been writing in the Politics section of the website for over five years, providing readers with up-to-date and insightful information about current events in politics. My work is widely read and respected by many industry professionals as well as laymen.
