The fight to find Pearl Pinson

A my m Aginnis-Honey AMAGINNIS@DAILYREPUBLIC.NET

VALLEJO — For seven years, Rose Pinson Rodriguez has held out hope her sister will be found.

Pearl Pinson was kidnapped May 25, 2016, on her way to school.

A day later, the suspected kidnapper, Fernando Castro of Vallejo, was killed in a shootout with police. Pearl was not found.

Their biological mother died last year not knowing the fate of her daughter, who was 15 at the time.

“She always wanted to know where Pearl was,” Rodriguez said. “She’s up there searching for my sister.”

Almost three years ago, three weeks after giving birth to her son, Andres Gabriel, her fiancé, Gabriel Mendoza, was killed. Mendoza, 24, was in the passenger seat of a friend’s car when someone opened fire on Broadway Street in Vallejo.

A suspect has not been arrested.

“It feels like it’s been too long and too short,” Rodriguez said, reflecting on her sister’s kidnap ping. “It’s hard to describe how I feel sometimes. In the last seven years there have times I heard her voice. I have tons of pic tures of her.”

A friend recently painted another.

In December 2022, Rodriguez got a message about a potential sighting of her younger sister. It wasn’t Pearl, she said.

She feels her sister and fiancé are in the cold case files. Rodriguez opts not to connect with detectives on the cases. Doing so brings back the heartbreak, as she is always bloomberg news

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy suggested his country was losing control of Bakhmut after months of fierce fighting but downplayed Russian claims it now fully occupied the eastern city.

“Today our people are performing an important task – they are in the Bakhmut, Zelenskyy said in Japan where he had met with leaders from the Group of Seven nations and other invited guests. “I will not share the points where. Bakhmut is not covered by the Russian Federation, there must not be multiple interpretations.”

Russia claimed overnight that the Wagner mercenary group had taken Bakhmut, with the Defense Ministry saying in a statement that the forces “completed the lib- eration of the city.” Asked earlier by a reporter during a meeting on Sunday with President Joe Biden if Bakhmut was still in Ukrainian hands, Zelenskyy said: “I think no.” But his spokesman Serhiy Nykyforov later said journalists misunderstood the comment.

The to and fro reflects the confusion that has reigned over Bakhmut for months, with frequent claims by both sides that the other was losing ground. Either way, the city is now in ruins.

“But for today, Bakhmut is only in our hearts. There is nothing,” Zelenskyy said earlier on Sunday, referring to the devastation the fighting has caused. The only thing left, he said, is “a lot of dead Russians.” Pictures he saw in Hiroshima of the devastation caused by the atomic