Serrano reportedly standing at the 2700 block of Mission Street, near 23rd Street, in San Francisco at roughly 11:30 a.m. on November 19, 2002, when he was picked up by two men wearing black bullet-proof vests and badges and armed with handguns. They forced Serrano into a white van at gunpoint. The van had an "E" symbol on its license plate, indicating official status. Witnesses to the incident assumed it was a police arrest they were seeing and did not try to intervene. Serrano did not resist the men. He has never been heard from again.

Serrano is a native of Mexico City, Mexico and an alleged narcotics trafficker who had been living in the San Francisco area for eight years prior to his disapperance. He reportedly also sold fake identity cards and documents and some people in his neighborhood think black-market rivals kidnapped him. Others believe he was arrested by federal authorities and was either deported or is being held in a detention facility. If this is the case, however, the authorities have not said so. The San Francisco police, who are investigating Serrano's disappearance, have contacted five different police departments in the San Francisco Bay area, as well as federal authorities and the Mexican consulate; none of them claim to know anything about Serrano's whereabouts. Some have theorized that he was abducted and murdered by rival drug dealers. He was prosecuted for felony drug possession in 1997, five years prior to his disappearance.

A restaurant owner in the neighborhood where Serrano was supposedly kidnapped claims to have served him a meal several hours after he allegedly vanished, but this sighting has not been verified and no one claims to have seen him after November 19. Serrano was carrying an automatic teller machine (ATM) card at the time of his disappearance; he has not used it since his apparent abduction. He had a live-in girlfriend of three years, whom he has not contacted since his disappearance. They have a young child together. His girlfriend says it is very uncharacteristic of him not to contact her.

Serrano's case remains unsolved. Authorities cannot substantiate what happened to him; the circumstances surrounding his disappearance are unclear.