Missing Long Island brothers: NYC medical examiner seeks clues in Frank and Edgar Sanchez's disappearances

Investigators with the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner have joined in efforts to discover what happened to two Long Island brothers who mysteriously disappeared in the weeks before 9/11, officials and family members of the missing said.

Frank and Edward Sanchez, 54 and 44 years old at the time, were last seen when they left a family home in Baldwin at 9:15 p.m. on Aug. 30, 2001, to visit a friend who ran an auto body shop in West Babylon.

In a statement to Newsday, Mark Desire, assistant director for biology at OCME, said the office has already completed a check of morgue records as far back as the date of the disappearances and came up with negative results. Such morgue checks generally involve examination of a body’s ethnic and racial characteristics, said one forensic expert. DNA samples taken from family members by the Nassau County Police Department are also continuously compared with unidentified bodies in New York City, Desire said.

"We will continue to support the search and any other services needed," he said.

According to court records and interviews, the Sanchez brothers — who had arrests records for serious international heroin trafficking — never arrived at the Suffolk County location. Instead, their white 1992 Chevrolet Lumina was found illegally parked on Grand Street in the city's Chinatown, some 45 miles from West Babylon.

A missing persons investigation started by Nassau police detectives in 2001 came up with no leads about what had happened to the men.

After years passed with no new developments, children of the Sanchez brothers in July turned to OCME, which has an open-door policy in accepting missing persons cases involving subjects from any jurisdiction.

OCME’s primary role in the case would be to identify any remains which may surface within city limits and determine possible causes of death. The criminal investigation technically remains under the jurisdiction of the Nassau authorities, who got the initial missing persons case.

Officials with NCPD did not reply to a request for comment for this story.

Steve Davis, a former NYPD deputy commissioner, said that the location of remains would be of significant consequence for investigators.

"If they have bodies, you can get the cause of death and location, those are the only two things that would give a broad range of investigative lead," he said.

Frank Sanchez's youngest daughter, Vivienne Maldonado, 42, of Baldwin, , said OCME investigators told her that they can seek to obtain DNA samples from Frank Sanchez’s son Frank Jr., who is living in Europe, as a way of getting additional genetic markers from a male family member. Maldonado, her sister and female cousin had already given DNA samples when the case first broke.

Bruce Budowle, a DNA expert who helped establish the FBI’s DNA database years ago, said having more genetic markers from a close relative generally raises the chance of making an identification of remains.

"I am happy about it," Maldonado said about OCME's involvement. "So long as they are looking at it, I have hope."

Experienced investigators said that until remains are found, the case of the Sanchez brothers, whose families are resigned to the strong possibility they are dead, will remain a difficult one to solve for the NCPD.

The case was first chronicled in a Newsday story in September 2025. Their families decided to speak out then because they not only feared the case was given little attention at the time because of the terror attack but that the passage of time could mean the loss of important witnesses or leads.

Maldonado, her sister Janine, 44, and Edgar’s daughter Janice, 37, told Newsday that the two missing men planned to travel east the evening of Aug. 30, 2001, to visit their friend Matthew Grillo, who ran a well-known West Babylon body shop that catered to the auto racing community. Frank Sanchez was a part-time race driver.

Nassau County Surrogate’s Court records noted that Grillo said the brothers never arrived. In a telephone interview with Newsday in July, Grillo, who now lives in North Carolina, said the brothers never called to say they were coming to visit and insisted he never saw them that night.

Sanchez family members said their relatives may have gotten mixed with the wrong crowd.

Frank Sanchez pleaded guilty in 1995 along with his cousin Charles Galletti and several others for involvement in an international heroin operation which smuggled in an estimated $1 billion worth of the drug over the years, court records show. Sanchez and Galletti received prison sentences of 30 months and four years respectively. 

Joseph Giacalone, a former NYPD detective sergeant who worked on cold cases, said it is possible the Sanchez brothers met foul play on Long Island and that their car was driven to Chinatown as a way of confusing police about the true location of the crime. If the men were ambushed, their family members think it would have been a struggle since Frank and Edgar were physically large — 6 feet tall and between 220 to 240 pounds.

For now, the discovery of the car in Chinatown remains the main intriguing clue in a case struggling for answers about what happened to the brothers in the four to five hours after they left the Baldwin home a quarter century ago,

Frank Sanchez was declared legally dead in 2010 after his son filed a special action in Nassau County Surrogate’s Court. The family of Edgar Sanchez has yet to file for such a death declaration.

Since so much time has passed and technology wasn’t as advanced in 2001 as it is today, the case is made more difficult, Davis said.

"If you don’t find the bodies on this cold case you don’t have a hell of a lot to work with, since it is 25 years," Davis said. 

For the families of the missing, who have over 24 grandchildren, the worst part is that there is still no answer to the mystery.

"There is no closure, no answer, nothing to tell my kids," said Maldonado, a mother of three. "There was no goodbye, no nothing."

By Anthony M. DeStefano

tony.destefano@newsday.comtonynewsday

Anthony M. DeStefano has been a reporter for Newsday since 1986 and covers law enforcement, criminal justice and legal affairs from its New York City offices.