Family Reunited : A Little Kid and a Tall Tale

Alberto Moreno is a 10-year-old boy who has been known to misplace a jacket or two--behavior that generally upsets his father. A construction worker with a wife and three children, Jose Moreno doesn’t understand why lost jackets should be regularly factored into the family budget.

But Jose Moreno really became angry Dec. 12, when Alberto came home from 36th Street Elementary School wearing a coat that wasn’t his. The boy had lost another jacket, it seemed, and thought the substitute might satisfy his father.

Wrong. Alberto got a spanking. Take that coat back where you got it, Jose Moreno told his son. And don’t come home until you find your own.

Alberto headed out. A few anxious hours later, Moreno reported to police that his son was missing. Eight days crawled by for the worried parents with no word about the boy.

Then Friday, father and son were reunited in a hallway at the Los Angeles Police Department’s Southwest Division. As Jose Moreno bent down to hug his son, the mop-topped Alberto looked at the floor, his face gloomy with shame. He clutched two chocolate-chip cookies and a batch of photographs of himself that police had been passing around the neighborhood, a few souvenirs from his sojourn as a missing child.

But for all the time that Alberto was missing, he was safe in a foster home under the auspices of the city Department of Child Services. The reunion would have come much sooner but for a communication breakdown between police and child service workers, along with Alberto’s own guile.

Ironically, Alberto entered the city’s custody through a pilot project, Emergency Response in the Community, which had stationed child service workers inside the Southwest Division station to improve the agency’s effectiveness and communication with police.

When Alberto was brought into the police station Dec. 12, apparently by a sympathetic woman who thought he was lost, he was immediately turned over to the child service worker on duty.

Said He Wandered Streets

Speaking only Spanish at first, Alberto told a story that he had been wandering the streets for three days, and that his parents had returned to their native El Salvador. The Moreno family are indeed Salvadoran immigrants; otherwise, Alberto’s tale was a tall one.

“If a child provides us with information, you have to go with what he says. We were under the impression that his parents were not in Los Angeles,” Gerhard Moland, the project director, said. He said some misunderstandings may have contributed to the problem. “In a system as big as the LAPD and ours, it can happen.”

“He was afraid he was going to be spanked, that’s all. So he created this big story,” police Detective Clayton Tave said. “Smart little kid.”

Later, Alberto, who has lived in the United States for less than two years, began to tell his story in nearly fluent English.

“Even the lady in the shelter was impressed by how smart he was because he claimed he learned to speak English in his three days on the street,” Sgt. John Rice, coordinator of Southwest’s juvenile unit, said with a wry laugh. “A 10-year-old con artist is what he is, I guess.”

Driving Up and Down Streets

But while Alberto was living in a foster home, his parents were driving up and down miles of streets, searching for their son.

“We couldn’t sleep, we were so worried. . . . We worried about killers and crazy people on the streets,” Jose Moreno said.

He often visited the police station, hoping to hear of progress in the case. There wasn’t any, even though a police unit was assigned on a 24-hour basis.

On Thursday, Rice said, a new set of photos had been run off and a door-to-door appeal for help was being planned.

“Then a patrol officer walks by and says, that kid was in the station the other day,” he said.

And so it was that the reunion took place. Later, riding in a car with his father from the police station, Alberto managed a few smiles. His aunt had promised to give him a calculator for Christmas, he said.

His father asked if he was going to run away again. Alberto, no longer smiling, shook his head and said no.