Girl Being Sought in Abduction Gives Up

Less than 24 hours after her mother made an emotional plea for her to surrender, 16-year-old kidnaping suspect Dana Jennifer O’Hair called police from a pay telephone in Garden Grove and gave herself up Sunday.

“All she said was, ‘I want to turn myself in,’ ” Garden Grove Police Lt. Scott Hamilton said.

Dana had been the object of a search since the Thursday morning disappearance of 3-year-old Jennifer Lend Ruengsri from a Huntington Beach apartment. The toddler was found unharmed at 10 p.m. Friday, wandering alone near Anaheim’s Sage Park, and was reunited with her mother a short time later.

The Anaheim teen-ager, who was described by her mother as “an emotionally disturbed runaway,” contacted the Garden Grove Police Department about 11:40 a.m. Sunday from a pay telephone at a shopping center, Hamilton said.

Found Her Waiting

Hamilton said an officer who apparently knew Dana from a previous arrest was dispatched to the address in the heart of the Vietnamese community’s shopping district, where he found the teen-ager waiting by a telephone booth near the intersection of Bolsa Avenue and Bushard Street.

Hamilton said Dana apparently decided to call police after she talked to some friends, who convinced her to turn herself in.

On Saturday, Dana’s mother, a 41-year-old Anaheim woman who declined to give her name but allowed herself to be photographed during a news conference, tearfully pleaded for Dana to surrender.

“The police are not interested in making a criminal out of her. They want to help her,” Dana’s mother said in a message to her daughter at the Adam Walsh Center for Missing Children in Orange at a joint news conference with Jennifer’s mother, Rungrachanee Ruengsri, 19.

Dramatic Ending

The girl’s surrender provided a dramatic ending to an unusual kidnaping in which the young suspect allegedly took the toddler from the Ruengsri family, which had befriended her and took her in last Sunday. Dana’s mother said she believes Dana took the toddler to replace her own daughter, Nikita, who was stillborn last October.

Jennifer was discovered missing from her uncle’s Huntington Beach apartment at 10:30 a.m. Thursday when her mother awoke. After the dark-haired child was found, Huntington Beach police said she was examined by doctors, who found no evidence of physical or sexual abuse.

Dana, described as 5 feet, 4 inches tall, about 110 pounds with blue eyes and dark brown hair worn “punk” style, with one side spiked and the other slicked back, was being questioned Sunday by Huntington Beach police, and was expected to be taken to Orange County Juvenile Hall pending a decision on how to handle her case.

According to Huntington Beach police, Dana had been staying at the apartment in the 4900 block of Heil Avenue since March 1, when Jennifer’s 21-year-old uncle, Suchait Ruengsri, met her outside a Huntington Beach restaurant and invited her to stay at his house because he felt sorry for her. Dana had played with Jennifer for several days and had asked the child’s mother if she could be Jennifer’s “pretend” mother, officers said.

Police said the child’s mother had told them she asked her brother to tell Dana to leave after finding some of her jewelry in the young woman’s purse. But when Rungrachanee Ruengsri awoke at 10:30 a.m. Thursday, she said, she saw the sliding glass door to the apartment wide open and found that both Dana and the child were gone, along with some of her own clothes and her daughter’s, and about $5 in cash was missing from her purse.

At Saturday’s news conference in the City of Orange, Dana’s mother said she was grateful that Jennifer had been found and that she thought her daughter had deliberately left Jennifer near the park so that the toddler would be found. But she pleaded for her daughter to surrender. “Now my baby is gone,” she said, “and we want her to come back.”

A Trouble Girl

Clutching a tear-soaked tissue, Dana’s mother, who has remarried, described the teen-ager as a troubled girl who “kept everything inside.”

“I’ve been trying to get help for Dana for three years and have come upon a blank wall,” she said, adding that her daughter had run away several times. “The police kept telling me there is nothing they can do until she breaks a law.”

Dana became pregnant in 1986, and last October delivered a premature, stillborn daughter, her mother said. The baby was born two months early and died of complications from the Rh factor in her blood. Her mother said Dana, whom she last saw on Feb. 19, had cried recently about the stillbirth and indicated that she wanted to get pregnant again.

The woman said she thought Dana took Jennifer “because she fell in love with her and had lost a little girl . . . In Dana’s mind, that’s what her little girl would have looked like.”

Times staff writer Marcida Dodson contributed to this story.