Police Comb Santa Ana for Missing 9-Year-Old

Police and volunteers combed a Santa Ana neighborhood Thursday looking for a 9-year-old girl missing since she left Monte Vista Elementary School the day before.

Patricia Lopez, a third-grader, was last seen by a teacher about 2:50 p.m. Wednesday walking out a school gate. Patricia’s mother usually meets her at the corner of Center Street and McFadden Avenue, Santa Ana Police Sgt. Collie Provence said. “But yesterday, her mother was just a few minutes late.”

The corner is about a block from the school gate and within seven blocks of the family’s home, he said.

When Patricia’s mother, Modesta Lopez, did not find her daughter waiting at the corner Wednesday, she went home to look. Then she and her other children searched the neighborhood.

Door-to-Door Search

After four hours, the family called police. With a helicopter hovering overhead, about 27 officers went door to door during the night with a photograph of Patricia.

On Thursday, 25 volunteers from the Orange County Search and Rescue Team joined about 35 police officers and several canine units in a search of an area roughly bounded by Fairview Street on the west, Edinger Avenue on the south, Raitt Street on the east and 1st Street on the north.

The third door-to-door search of the area was completed Thursday afternoon “to no avail.” At 6 p.m. police took down the command post they had established in the neighborhood, Lt. Jack Nelson said. The case has been handed over to an investigator, who will follow up on possible leads, he said.

“We’re getting hundreds of calls from all over Southern California,” which the investigator will check out, he said. “People are calling, trying to help.”

Among the callers, he said, were three psychics.

Patricia is 4 feet tall and has long, dark hair worn braided or straight. She was wearing a yellow, flowered blouse, black pants, a blue jacket and white sneakers, Provence said.

The family had no conflicts and the girl had never run away, he said. The possibility of kidnaping, Provence said, is “obviously our greatest concern right now. With each passing hour, the chances of us finding her grow slimmer.”

Patricia’s older brother, Hector Lopez, 19, said: “We went walking all over the neighborhood during the night. We didn’t stop until 4 a.m. Then we got up around 7 a.m. and still went knocking on doors.”

Patricia’s father, Ascension Lopez, who works for a Huntington Beach waste disposal company, “didn’t sleep at all,” his son said. “He kept going all night. He kept looking and looking for her. He wouldn’t stop. She was his baby. He would call her his ‘Little Negrita.’ You know, because she had dark skin.”

Patricia is the youngest of seven children in the family, Hector Lopez said. She had recently transferred to Monte Vista, but did not like its year-round schedule, her brother said.

Monte Vista Principal Donald Tibbetts said no one at the school reported seeing suspicious cars or people Wednesday.

“We’ve talked to every teacher and every child, and they know absolutely nothing about how the girl could have vanished,” Tibbetts said.

Some parents, concerned about their children, called the school Thursday offering to be aides at recess, Tibbetts said.

“We watch them in school and try to monitor them when they leave (school),” he said. “But when they’re on their way home, you can’t watch them all.”

Some parents said Thursday that they worry about Jerome Park, next to Monte Vista School, because it attracts unemployed men.

“That happens here always. These men drink and they bother the children,” said Gabina Estrada, who was one of many parents who accompanied their children to school Thursday.

Police called off the search late Thursday afternoon, asking anyone with information to telephone the department’s Juvenile Division at (714) 647-5147 or 834-4801.