This is Shadows on Delancey, a podcast about crime, memory, and the spaces between truth and evidence. I’m your host, Rachel Moran.

Today, we’re going back to New York City—specifically, the Lower East Side. It’s November 2014. A 29-year-old man named Daniel Ruiz leaves a bar on Delancey Street just after midnight. He never makes it home.

What follows is a case filled with leads, contradictions, surveillance gaps, and years of questions that prosecutors were never able to turn into charges.