Parents Offer Reward to Find Ill Daughter, 18

The parents of an 18-year-old mentally retarded woman who disappeared from her Sylmar home last week offered a $5,000 reward Sunday for information leading to her return.

Mary and John Allen said they decided to put up the reward after a door-to-door police search produced no trace of their daughter, Michelle.

Mary White said her daughter reads at the fourth-grade level and has the comprehension of a second-grader. Her parents said she needs an antidepressant medication she has been taking since being hospitalized for six weeks earlier this year because of a mental breakdown.

“Without the medication she is going to withdraw and regress,” Mary Allen said.

The Allens reported their daughter missing Thursday afternoon.

That night and all day Friday, police knocked on doors in the semirural neighborhood near Herrick Avenue and Roxford Street.

The search produced no evidence of harm to the woman, but police were unable to find anyone who had seen her after 9 a.m. Thursday.

After news reports about Michelle’s disappearance, the Los Angeles Police Department has been receiving two to three calls an hour from people who reported seeing her, some from as far away as Santa Monica, Sgt. Clifton Boyer said Sunday.

Officers were checking the reports, he said. Police believe she either ran away or got lost, he said.

“I think somebody just might have picked her up,” Mary Allen said Sunday morning, fighting tears as she sat at her kitchen table with her husband and several neighbors and relatives. “If she was still walking around, somebody would have seen her.”

‘Fearful of People’

Michelle Allen was described as about five feet tall and 120 to 125 pounds, with long brown hair and brown eyes. She was wearing a light green, short-sleeved sweater, jeans and white and blue tennis shoes when she disappeared, her mother said.

“She suffered a severe psychological breakdown in February,” Mary Allen said. “She has become very depressed. She’s at times paranoid. She’s very fearful of people. She is unable to take care of herself.”

Michelle was attending classes for the mentally retarded at San Fernando High School, her mother said.

On her way to work each morning, Mary Allen would drive her daughter a few blocks to the house of a caretaker, whom she referred to as a “baby sitter.” The caretaker then would drive Michelle to the the school-bus stop.

May Have Wandered

But Thursday, the pattern changed when John Allen decided to take Michelle with him to work. He said he left the house in the morning for a short trip and told her he would return and pick her up.

“She wanted me to take her to the baby sitter,” he said. “I probably didn’t explain myself too carefully to her. I guess she got confused.”

Mary Allen said she believes her daughter tried to walk to the caretaker’s house and got lost.

Police were skeptical at first, she said.

“I couldn’t make anybody believe that she wasn’t a runaway,” she said. “They keep insisting that she’s with a friend. She doesn’t have a friend. She doesn’t know her way around.

“They think she’s going to call us. But she does not know the phone number at the house. She’s not a street-wise kid at all.”