Accused of Taking Girl, 3 : Kidnap Suspect, 16, Had Stillborn Infant

When a 16-year-old runaway staying with a 3-year-old girl and her family in Huntington Beach asked if she could pretend to be the girl’s mother, the child’s real mother thought it was a joke, she said Friday.

But the question may have been more serious than she thought. The runaway, Dana Jennifer O’Hair, allegedly abducted Jennifer Lend Ruengsri from her home Thursday morning while the child’s mother slept.

“We were riding in a car one day, and she said, ‘Can I be the mother for the day?’ ” Rungrachanee Ruengsri said Friday. “I thought she was joking. I said OK. Then Dana told Jennifer she was her new mommy, but Jennifer pointed to me and said, ‘That’s my mommy.’ ”

The child weighs about 50 pounds and is 3 feet tall, with dark brown hair and brown eyes. She was last seen with Dana getting off an Orange County Transit District bus at Chestnut Street and Orange Avenue in Santa Ana about 11 a.m. Thursday, police said, explaining that they were spotted by someone on the bus.

Dana is described as 5 feet, 4 inches tall, about 110 pounds, with blue eyes and dark brown hair worn “punk style,” slicked back on one side and spiked on the other. Police say Dana had a stillborn baby last year and may be suffering emotional problems as a result.

Police Sgt. Jim Dahl said Friday afternoon that the investigation is progressing very slowly.

“All of the leads we got this morning have really come to nothing,” he said. “We’re trying to retrace them now, and we hope someone will call in or that she’ll get tired of having the baby.”

Ruengsri said she realized her daughter and Dana were gone when she awoke Thursday morning and saw the sliding glass door of her apartment wide open.

“I looked in her closet, and her things were gone; some of Jennifer’s clothes were gone, and some of my clothes were gone,” Ruengsri said. “I had my brother go look for her, and then I called the police.”

Chris Witt, the mother’s boyfriend, said Friday that the child’s uncle found a note Thursday night that apparently had been written by Dana. It had been crumpled and shoved under a couch, he said. The note said she was going to use a phone to call someone, Witt said, and then had a postscript that said: “Don’t worry about Jennifer. I’ve had one of my own, so I know how to take care of her.”

Ruengsri, 19, said Dana was “nice, but she would snoop all the time, and that got on my nerves fast. One time she grabbed my purse and started looking through it in front of me.”

Dana had been staying with the child and the child’s mother and uncle at their home in the 4900 block of Heil Avenue since Sunday.

The uncle, Suchat Ruengsri, said Friday that he met Dana at a restaurant in Huntington Beach and offered her a place to stay for a couple of days because she didn’t have a place to go.

The mother said she had told her brother to ask Dana to leave after finding some of her jewelry in the girl’s purse.

“I told her the night before she left that she had to leave,” he said.

The uncle, who is 21, said that during O’Hair’s stay everyone in the home had seemed to get along well.

“I thought everything was all right until this came down,” he said. “We’ll find her somehow.”

Help for Dana, in the form of legal counsel, shelter and counseling, was offered Friday by Mothers and Others Against Child Abuse in Huntington Beach, said Sally Nava Kanarek, the group’s executive director.

“We want her to know the immediate return of the child is the most important factor,” Kanarek said. “We want her to know she has friends. She can call us and have someone with her to turn herself in.”

Jennifer’s mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and uncle all stressed that the most important thing was to find the little girl.

Jennifer’s mother said Dana had talked about having a child of her own who had been taken away by an ex-husband.

“She said she wished she could see it,” Ruengsri said. “She wished she could take care of her little girl again.”

But Dahl said Dana’s baby was stillborn last October. Initially, police believed the child was stillborn after a January car accident, but Dahl said Friday that she had lost her child three months before the crash.

Dahl said police believe Dana is suffering from emotional problems related to the loss of her baby. He said she has run away periodically from her parents’ Anaheim home during the last two years but declined to disclose the names of her parents.

Ruengsri and her mother, Aroon Cancellieri, said they drove around a mini-mall Friday morning where Ruengsri and Dana had been several days before but saw no sign of them.

Janet MacMillan, Jennifer’s great-grandmother, said she didn’t know about the incident until she heard a news report on the radio Friday morning on her way to work.

MacMillan said Jennifer is a “sweet, lovable little girl. She’s very bright and verbal. She expresses herself beautifully.”

She said her grandson feels guilty for bringing the runaway into his home but added that he would not show much emotion or tell others that he blamed himself. She quickly added that no one blames him for the child’s disappearance.

MacMillan described her grandson and granddaughter as very caring people. “They can hardly take care of themselves, but they offered what they had to someone who was in need,” she said. “You can’t open your door to anybody anymore.”