It’s been 360 days — just four days shy of a year — since transgender woman Pauline Del Mundo disappeared without a trace from DFW International Airport on her way from her home in Tampa, Fla., to Cozumel, Mexico for vacation. And her family continues to search for their missing sister, hoping they will eventually be able to “bring Pauline home.”
Pauline, 59, is a naturalized American citizen of Asian/Filipino descent who lived in Tampa where she worked as a nursing assistant at a federal veterans hospital. She was on her way to Cozumel for a 10-day vacation, but according to her sisters Yolanda Del Mundo and Lolita Gaviola, during a layover at the DFW airport she changed her mind and decided to go back to Tampa.
Video cameras at DFW International Airport captured footage of Pauline Del Mundo before she vanished.
Pauline called one of her sisters in Tampa and asked for help in purchasing a ticket to fly back home. But when her sister called backed for flight details, she couldn’t reach Pauline. Her family has not heard from her since.
According to information sent to Dallas Voice by Yolanda Del Mundo, video footage from cameras at the airport offered some clues. The videos show that Pauline left Terminal C at 10:30 p.m., walking two-and-a-half miles up International Parkway, away from the airport and toward the south service road. She walked by a valet gate, going in the direction of the airport’s warehouse district at 1:48 a.m., then walked across the street from the warehouses and sat down on the curb.
Pauline was seen sitting on a curb on the south end of the official warehouse district near the intersection of South 20th Ave. and 5 Airfield until 3:52 a.m. when she abruptly stood up and walked away, going around the corner headed east. Video footage shows Pauline walking around a DFW Airport sign, with the sign then blocking her from view.
That was the last time Pauline was seen.
Yolanda Del Mundo said in an email to Dallas Voice this week that the warehouse area where Pauline was last seen on video is near the main north/south road through the airport, and while technically still airport property, that area is leased to different private companies.
The intersection where she was last seen is surrounded by construction ditches, ravines, swampy areas, a small lake and lots of wooded, brushy areas that are “hard to search with a small number of people,” according to a case advocate with Malaya Movement Northern Texas, a human rights group that has been working with the family over the last year.
The Malaya Movement also helped bring in the Community United Effort for Missing Persons, a nationwide, non-profit volunteer organization dedicated to finding missing persons recently, Yolanda Del Mundo said. CUE recently conducted a physical search, with 13 Texas-based volunteers, led by CUE’s Texas deputy director, Crystal Fields, searching the area where Pauline was last seen. That search found no traces of the missing woman, but CUE plans to conduct another search of the area next month, including areas within the periphery of the airport property outside the terminal where Pauline was seen
In the meantime, Pauline Del Mundo’s family remains “puzzled and disturbed” by their sister’s disappearance, “at a loss [as to] whether she was assaulted, kidnapped, murdered or mutilated,” or still alive somewhere, “walking aimlessly as a homeless person on the streets of Fort Worth or Dallas, an area unfamiliar to her,” Yolanda Del Mundo said.
The family, she added, continues ”praying and hoping that she will be found safe in the face of this pandemic, in spite of the mental issues she [was] suffering [from] at the time she vanished.”
Pauline Del Mundo is 59 years old. She is of Asian/Filipino descent and is about 5’6” and of medium build. Yolanda Del Mundo noted that her sister’s legal name is Paulino Norberto Del Mundo Jr., and that ID documents she may have been carrying would still show that name.
Anyone with information that might help bring Pauline home is asked to call the DFW Airport Police Department at 972-973-3553, CUE at 910-343-1131 or the CUE Center 24-hour tip line at 910-232-1687.
— Tammye Nash
Dallas Voice is indeed a publication we can depend on most especially in our case of a beloved transgender sister gone missing in Texas. They have teached out and supported us by having an article published for the disappearance of Paula del Mundo, a trans woman at DFW Airport, Texas. As a ready media platform, they have fulfilled its purpose by helping desperate families like us. Appreciate your usual kind gesture of utmost concern. Thank you.
How in the world can someone just walk out of DFW like that. It’s one of the largest and busiest airports in the WORLD! Why didn’t ANY employees stop her to see if she was okay while walking down international parkway. Everyone who has been there knows people just don’t walk down that road in the middle of the airport. Where was airport security? This just seems so beyond strange. If I had been driving down International and saw someone walking down the road “it’s the size and speed of an expressway” I would call the police or report it to security. I pray for her and her family but I am just shocked this could have even happened.
Perhaps it is exactly because it so busy there that no one took note. And not everyone would be as thoughtful as you in stopping to check on someone, unfortunately
Come to think of it, it was quite strange, her yellow Nautica trolley bag was missing at that time she was spotted by the surveillance camera. Until now, Airport Security has not found the trolley bag, how much more a person gone missing within the premises of the airport property? This is puzzling? Security of travellers cannot be guaranteed. Safety messures must be ensured at all times.
The curb she was sitting on for a couple hours, was the department of public safety for DFW Airport built at that time? Unless I have the directions wrong from the article she would’ve been right at the intersection where that building exists now. It would be even more strange if she was sitting outside the DPS for two hours and no one saw her.
Yes, you are right Steven, according to the Airport police detectives, she even was almost infront of the DOS building. This is so strange, no one has caught their attention!So disturbing this could ever happen.
I have looked at the maps and tried to follow her path. I just don’t see how it’s possible for her to just disappear so easily like that. She was in areas with high traffic and in areas she shouldn’t have been. Airport security and DPS should have stopped her if the mapping is correct. I hate to say this but I think foul play has to be involved and is DPS or airport security trying to cover something up? I am not trying to be paranoid but this just doesn’t make any sense at all. Even if she managed to leave airport grounds, the airport is completely surrounded by expressways, someone would have seen her. And did they check security camera’s of businesses when you leave the airport?