Police Hunt Man, 30, in Disappearance of Girl Co-Worker, 16

Detectives are looking for a 30-year-old movie theater doorman who they suspect may have abducted a teen-age Calabasas girl early Saturday morning, Los Angeles police said Thursday.

Michelle Ann Zaslavsky, 16, an honors student at Calabasas High School, was last seen late Friday leaving the Woodland Hills movie theater where she works as a cashier, Detective Ed Pikor said.

Zaslavsky’s family and friends began searching for her early Saturday, and, about 2 a.m., found her 1987 Nissan, a birthday present from her father, abandoned a block from the theater. The auto’s hazard lights were blinking and the girl’s purse and identification were in the back seat, Pikor said.

“The car was her pride and joy,” Pikor said. “To find it abandoned the way it was, along with her identification and purse, is very, very suspicious.” The car was a block south of the theater, but was pointed north, indicating that she might have turned the car around after being flagged down, he said.

“She would call me . . . if she was going to be late or if she was even stopping for gas,” said Karin Zaslavsky, 42, the girl’s mother. “It’s way out of character for her not to do so.”

Friendship With Doorman

Thomas Allen Chapman of Canoga Park, a doorman at the theater, and Zaslavsky became friends soon after the girl began working at the Woodland Hills Cinema, in the 6400 block of Owensmouth Avenue, about five months ago, Pikor said. Three weeks ago, Zaslavsky told friends that she resisted Chapman’s attempts to make the friendship a romance, and that Chapman became upset, Pikor said.

The girl’s friends told investigators that Chapman made threats about other people Zaslavsky was dating, Pikor said. “He said something like, ‘I’ll have my brothers take care of them,’ ” Pikor said. “He always referred to his brothers.”

Chapman has not been seen since leaving the theater at 11 p.m. Friday, about a half hour before Michelle Zaslavsky left, Pikor said. Chapman told a supervisor he needed to leave early because one of his sisters had been in an accident and needed a blood transfusion from Chapman, Pikor said.

Detectives learned that neither of Chapman’s two sisters had been injured, Pikor said. Most of Chapman’s clothes are missing from his apartment, indicating that, “apparently, he packed up and left,” Pikor said.

Chapman told a family member two days before he was last seen that he was planning a trip to Oregon, Pikor said.

None of Michelle Zaslavsky’s belongings are missing from the family’s hillside home, her mother said. Last Friday, Michelle made Wednesday appointments to visit an orthodontist and to take several children she baby-sits to see the movie “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” she said.

The mother said Zaslavsky also called home from work the day she disappeared to check on her mother, who was ill. Before leaving the theater, the girl told a sister who was visiting from out of town that she would be home in 10 to 15 minutes so they could talk, the mother said.

Zaslavsky, who will be a senior this fall at Calabasas High, has been a straight-A student, a member of the basketball and swimming teams and an algebra tutor at the school, her mother said. The daughter plans to become a lawyer and a certified public accountant, she said.

“We’ve been sitting at the phone waiting for an incoming call for five days now,” said her father, Morton Zaslavsky, 68, a former Chicago criminal-defense attorney.