Nearly a year after state police found her body last October, a woman who went missing while attempting to walk across the border into Canada in January 2025 has been identified.
Claudia Vanessa Machado Martinez, 37, from Honduras, was traversing the woods with her 8-year-old son and a group of migrants led by a smuggler she found on Facebook, her mother told Seven Days in a telephone interview from Honduras.
Somehow, she became separated from the group and was left behind. The smuggler delivered the boy to his aunt’s house in Montréal and collected a payment of $5,000 for the crossing, but gave no word of what had happened to his mother.
“From there, we didn’t know anything,” said Claudia Martinez. “Not a trace of whether she was alive or dead.”
The family reported Machado Martinez missing to authorities in Honduras and Canada, her mother said. Relatives searched for her at Canadian hospitals and her husband posted pleas for information on missing person pages on Facebook.
Nine months later, a Vermont State Police search and rescue team located human remains near Jay. A death certificate completed in June and obtained by Seven Days confirms that the remains were Machado Martinez. The cause and manner of her death were “undetermined.”
Her mother said the family was notified in July. In March, Machado Martinez’s son, who is now 10, returned to Honduras to be with his father, Martinez said.
It’s unclear why it took so long for authorities to find Machado Martinez. According to a press release last year, Vermont State Police became involved in the case nine days before her body was found on October 29, after a request for help from U.S. Border Patrol.
Border agents had found items belonging to the woman in the woods in northern Vermont, and then referred the case to state police because it was in their jurisdiction, according to the statement.
Ryan Brissette, a spokesperson for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, told Seven Days last October that the initial missing person report the agency received “was so vague, we really didn’t have anything to go on. In October, we received more information, which is why we started searching in specific areas for this person.”
Deaths along this stretch of the border are relatively rare, but at least five migrants have died while attempting to cross in the Border Patrol’s Swanton Sector — 295-mile section that includes Vermont, New Hampshire and eastern New York — since 2020.
Machado Martinez had migrated to the U.S. with her son in 2023 to seek asylum, her mother said. Her husband planned to join them later on. According to a 2025 article in a Honduran news site, she lived for a while in Texas and worked at a school.
When Donald Trump assumed the presidency in January 2025 promising mass deportations, she considered returning to Honduras, but then chose instead to migrate to Canada, where she had relatives.
On January 29, she sent her husband a selfie with her son, both bundled in winter hats and jackets, smiling. The temperature that day reached a high of 26 degrees Fahrenheit, and a low of 6.
That was the last her family heard from her.
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