Pride Month: Naum Mendez

In honor of Pride Month I’m featuring a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer missing person every day for the month of June. Today’s case is Naum Rafael Mendez, a 33-year-old man who disappeared from Boca Raton, Florida on February 1, 2008.

Naum was, I think, bisexual — the casefile notes he had a wife and kids in Mexico but had a job dancing at a nightclub in drag and had a relationship with at least one man, Juan Carlos Atenco Camacho.

Atenco Camacho pleaded guilty to manslaughter in Naum’s case in 2012. His body was never found.

Murder charges in Naum Rafael Mendez’s case

Juan Carlos Atenco-Camacho has been charged with murdering 33-year-old Naum Rafael Mendez, a gay transvestite waiter who disappeared from Boca Raton, Florida in February 2008. I found two articles about this and I’m not real clear as to whether the body has been found; one article just says Atenco-Camacho lead the cops to the body; another says he lead them to the dump site and the police hadn’t found the body yet but they were looking.

In any case, Atenco-Camacho sounds like a real prince. He claims he’s straight, but he’d had sex with Mendez a few times. He is also married. He has a young son with his wife, and was keeping a teenage mistress on the side. The girl, who was 14 when she started dating Atenco-Camacho, was 16 and pregnant with his child when Mendez disappeared. Oh, and he’s a “habitual traffic offender.” Apparently Mendez confessed to Atenco-Camacho that he was in love with him and begged him to leave his wife, and they got into an argument and Atenco-Camacho stabbed him to death and dumped the body.

When people try to juggle multiple romantic relationships it often ends in tragedy.