His mother, Tina Alkhanashvili, dropped him off at school in the morning, as she normally did. A few hours later, around noon, he left and never returned. The only trace of him left at the school was his backpack. His mother waited until evening, and then she and relatives began to search for him, asking friends and acquaintances if they knew what had happened. No one knew anything. That night they went to the local police station, located in the center of one of the larger villages in the region. The brightly lit station looks like a UFO amid the typical small, poor Georgian houses, built from stone and covered with circular asbestos tiles.

The police checked their computer database, a product of Western assistance aimed at helping Georgia secure its borders. It turned out that Ramzan, along with a friend who was barely 16 years old, had gone to the airport in Tbilisi, Georgia's capital, and had flown out of the country at 3 in the afternoon, just a few hours after cutting out from school.