Part 1: Amber Belken’s Final Shift: Her Car Was Outside, But She Was Already Gone
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What happened the morning Amber Belken disappeared at her EB Games store?
A 25-year-old store manager drives to work the same way that she always does. The same route, the same time, the same routine that she has followed for three years. She unlocks the door, she steps inside, and she gets to work. At 9.08 in the morning, she texts her boyfriend three words, I love you. And four minutes later, she turns off the store alarm. And then somewhere in the quiet hour before the store was supposed to open its doors to the public, something happened inside that building. that no one saw, no one heard, and no one would fully understand for a very long time. This is Amber's story.
Hi everyone, welcome back to my channel. And if you have never been here before, I am Kimberlea and it's nice to finally meet you. Now, let me take you back to the morning in San Antonio, Texas. It's January 29th of 2007. Downtown Alamo has just opened its doors for the day. This is a place where a lot of tourists come and they're already making their way to the Riverwalk. They're boarding those little flat bottom boats that drift past the cypress trees and the restaurants and the old stone walls taking in whatever's left of the history along that stretch of water. This is an ordinary morning in an ordinary city and no one is paying particular attention to anything. A few miles north on San Pedro Avenue, a man named Mariano Rivera is starting his shift.
Mariano manages a video game store, and it's one of the EB Games locations scattered across the north side of the city. And his morning follows the same rhythm it always does. He gets in around nine, he gets the tills organized, he pulls together the previous day's cash for a bank run, and has everything ready before the doors even open at 10. It's a routine that runs like clockwork. It runs the same every day in every way at every EB Games in this area. Today is no different. At another store not far away, the same routine is underway. Amber gets there right around nine, like she always does. She unlocks the front door, she steps inside, the lights come on, and there's a quiet over the store before anyone else gets there.
At 9.08 that morning, she picks up her phone and she sends a text to her boyfriend, Fred. I love you. That's it. That's the whole message. Just three words. Four minutes later, at 9.12, she turned off the store alarm. Her name is Amber Belkin. She was 25 years old, five foot two, with light brown hair. She's been managing the store for three years. She knew every corner of it, every system, every procedure. She knew exactly what she was supposed to be doing that Monday morning, and she did it without hesitation. But at some point, between 9.08 and 10 a.m., her phone rang. It was another manager from a different location, and they were calling about something routine. They talked for a few minutes, but then Amber said she had to go because there was someone at the door.
Her voice was completely normal. There was no urgency, no alarm, nothing that made the other manager think twice. He just assumed she was going to check on whoever was there. People knock on stores before they open all the time. It happens. He assumed she would call back if there was anything else to say. But she didn't call back. And at 10 o'clock, that store didn't open. And before we get deeper into what happened on that Monday morning, before we talk about what was found and what was taken and what was left behind, you need to know who Amber Belkin was. not just in the way that true crime sometimes introduces a victim, a name, a job, a few adjectives. I mean, actually get to know her. Because I believe the only way that anything that follows is going to mean what it's supposed to is if you understand who was in that store when the doors closed.
So let's go back to the beginning. Amber Marie Belkin was born on December 6th of 1981 in San Antonio, Texas. She was the only child of Randy and Lee Belkin, and from the very first day, that fact shaped everything about how she grew up. Not in a spoiled way, not in an overprotective way, but in the way that being someone's whole world tends to shape a person.
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3 chaptersSpeakers
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