A 42-year-old Italian molecular biologist named Alessandro Coatti was discovered dead in Colombia. The dismembered remnants of his body were discovered inside a suitcase in a rural region near Santa Marta, a city of approximately 400 thousand people on the Atlantic Ocean in the Magdalena department. According to the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo, Coatti came in Santa Marta on April 3 to spend a few days relaxing on Central America's Caribbean beaches. He was residing in a hotel in the historic center; however, all indications of his whereabouts had vanished since the evening of last Friday, April 4.  A hostel employee stated that Coatti had "asked several times for information on the routes to reach Minca", a town in the Sierra Nevada massif, "and if there was a possibility of studying the species in the area". On Friday, at sunset, Alessandro left the hostel and never returned. Search operations began the next day and ended in the worst possible way. Coatti studied "Cellular and Molecular Biology" at the Normale University of Pisa, where he received his master's degree in 2010 with 110 laude. He then relocated to the United Kingdom for an internship at the Italian Embassy in London. From 2012 to 2014, he studied for a master's degree at the University College of London and worked as a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany. Coatti had worked for 8 years at the Royal Society of Biology in London, which remembered him as a “funny, warm, intelligent man, loved by all who worked with him".