‘Just Trying to Hold Up’ : Parents of Stolen Baby Wait, Wonder

A day after their sandy-haired infant daughter was kidnaped at gunpoint from their Riverside home, Sharon and Monte Howard waited Wednesday for some clue to their baby’s whereabouts.

“We have no ideas, nothing to go on right now,” Monte Howard, who works as a computer technician in Glendale, said Wednesday. “We’re just trying to hold up. We can’t afford to do anything else right now.”

Three-week-old Lauren Nicole Howard was abducted Tuesday morning by a heavy-set, Caucasian woman who came to the Howards’ door and asked to use the telephone, explaining that her car had broken down.

Sharon Howard, at home with the baby and her ailing 7-year-old son, Corey, allowed the stranger inside because “she looked OK,” the shaken mother said Wednesday. But a short time later, the denim-clad, dark-haired woman pulled a revolver from her purse, robbed Howard and left with the blue-eyed infant.

Riverside police said Wednesday they have no idea who took the baby or why.

“It’s too premature right now to say why it happened,” said Police Lt. Jim Rector. “It is bizarre.”

Although Sharon Howard caught a glimpse of the kidnaper’s car as the woman sped off, she could recall only part of the license number. The car, described as an older model, orange-colored station wagon, possibly a Japanese import, had a license plate bearing the characters 1-B-I-O-J, Rector said.

“We’re trying to run down the license plate. Only we’re not sure what order those (characters) are in,” Rector added.

Mystified by what took place Tuesday, Sharon Howard kept repeating how the woman had looked “decent enough” to allow inside.

“Otherwise, I would not have let her in my home,” she said, speaking in a monotone. “We even conversed a little bit about how we hated car trouble.”

Recalling what happened, the mother said she had Lauren in her arms when the woman, appearing to be in her middle to late 30s, knocked on the door. Son Corey, ill with an ear infection, was with his mother and sister in their three-bedroom home, just two blocks from the UC Riverside campus.

“She said she needed to reach her husband and asked to use the phone,” Howard recalled. “There was no answer and she said she would try her car again. A minute later, she came back and said: ‘Now, it won’t even turn over. Can I try calling my husband again?’

“I said, sure.”

Again, no answer. Howard said the woman started to leave but pulled a gun from her purse as she neared the front door. “She instructed me to tell my son to go into the bedroom and shut the door and to set the baby in the baby carrier, which was on the floor,” Howard said. “Then she told me to lie on the floor and to keep my face to the ground at all times.

“I kept pleading with her and begging her not to hurt my family.”

The stranger promised she would not, Howard said.

“She told me she wasn’t going to hurt my family, she wasn’t going to take my children. She said, ‘I have too many children of my own already.’ ”

But Howard said the woman told her a male companion outside the house would kill her if she did not cooperate. “I don’t know whether this person was fictitious or not,” she said.

‘The Baby Was Gone’

“I closed my eyes and had my hands behind my back like she instructed me. I heard movement around the house and then I heard somebody leave.

“I looked over at the baby carrier and the baby was gone.”

Running out of the house, Howard caught a brief glimpse of the speeding car then hurried back inside. “I had to see if my son was OK,” she said.

Monte Howard said Wednesday their son “is holding up well. But later on, we’ll probably have to get into counseling. He did see the gun.”

Right now, he said, the family’s top priority is getting Lauren back.

“She’s a quiet baby, a good baby, a real normal little girl,” he said. “We’ll do everything to get her back.”