Disappearance of John and Gianinna Colonna

On May 5, 1974, siblings John Gianot Colonna Aponte, 12, and Giannina Maria Colonna Aponte, 11, disappeared in Puerto Rico while on their way to meet a friend at Luquillo beach. The children, who were close and shared friends, were Puerto Ricans of French descent; their father, John Colonna Sr., was French and American and died in 1982. After the siblings vanished, their mother, Noemí Aponte, contacted the adult male friend they had been going to meet, but he told her he had not seen the children that day.

Investigators came to believe the children had been abducted after a neighbor of the Colonna family, businessman Tomás Rodriguez, left a suicide note indicating he had knowledge of the disappearance. Rodriguez, who had relocated to Miami shortly after the children vanished, wrote that unidentified kidnappers had planned to collect a $72,000 ransom. No further identification of the alleged kidnappers is documented in available reporting.

The case saw a significant development in the early 2000s. According to information Noemí Aponte provided to the Puerto Rican newspaper Primera Hora in 2013, the FBI told her in 2002 that they had located a woman in Mayagüez whom they believed might be Gianinna Colonna. DNA testing was carried out in 2005 using samples from the woman and from the exhumed remains of John Colonna Sr. The results led investigators to inform Noemí that the Colonna children were not her husband's biological children — a conclusion she strongly disputed, saying, "John, my husband, was the love of my life, my first love, my first man, so how are they going to come and tell me the children aren't his?" She further said she felt investigators "wanted to solve the case at my expense, from my pain, and that is disgusting." It was also established that Noemí had not been in Mayagüez during the period investigators were looking into the woman believed to be Gianinna.

In 2012, Alberto Grajales, director of Interpol in Puerto Rico, stated that the Forensic Sciences Institute had certified that John Colonna Sr. was not the father of the Colonna children, and said there was no basis for a public apology to Noemí. He also indicated that if Noemí proceeded with plans to have her children legally declared dead, the case would be archived by his agency.

Noemí Aponte died on April 2, 2023, without her children's fate having been determined. The disappearance of John and Gianinna Colonna remains classified as an open, unsolved case in Puerto Rico.