Police in Madrid and Fort Lauderdale were notified, launching investigations on each side of the Atlantic.
Ana Maria Knezevic traveled from South Florida to Spain in December to get away for a while. Her family and friends say the naturalized American originally from Colombia has been going through a nasty divorce from her Serbian husband, but the trip was also a chance to explore new places.
Then, she vanished — two weeks ago, shortly after a man wearing a motorcycle helmet disabled the security cameras at her Madrid apartment building by spray painting the lenses. The next day, two friends received separate text messages — one in English, one in Spanish — from the 40-year-old’s phone saying she was running off for a few days with a man she had just met.
“She wouldn’t do this … it is very unsafe and crazy behavior. She wouldn’t do that. She wouldn’t do that,” said Sanna Rameau, the friend who got the English text. It was written, she said, in an emotionless style that wasn’t Ana’s. The Spanish message was so flat it appeared to have been written in English and run through Google Translate, she said.
Empathizing with individuals is built into how the human brain works, because we can theoretically do something about the plight of a single person - at least, this was true in an age before mass communication, when our world was only as large as the people we interacted with. It was mutually beneficial for humans to develop an instinct to help those in their own social group, because it was more likely to result in one’s own DNA being passed on.
Hearing about the problems of large numbers of people doesn’t click the same way for us because, for the majority of human history, it didn’t affect one’s ability to further one’s genes. Aiding some random person from a distant tribe just doesn’t figure into an individual’s reproductive fitness. We don’t have an instinct to help people we don’t know, especially when they don’t have a name and a face. And so it’s not ingrained in us. It has to be taught.