Mother Gets Help, Ticket to See Baby

When the police called Thursday night and told her that they had found her 6-month-old daughter well and sound and in Texas, Martha Gallegos figured that the worst was over.

Ten days before, she had awakened in a hospital bed, her throat mottled with bruises and punctured by scissors, to learn that her common-law husband, the man police say had nearly killed her, had also taken their baby, Katherine.

But Katherine was in Texas and her mother was in Los Angeles--and the price of even a bus ticket was as enormous and impossible as the miles that lay between them.

“I didn’t know what to do, how to get her,” said Gallegos, a Spanish-speaking immigrant who has twin 5-year-old sons back in El Salvador.

Enter Los Angeles Police Detective Sam Jacobellis, who investigated the attack on Gallegos, left for dead by her common-law husband, Howard Pablo, 30. A no-bail warrant on charges of attempted murder, child abduction and assault with a deadly weapon has been issued for him.

“We told her the child was in good hands. She was ecstatic but crying because she had no way to go get her,” Jacobellis said. “I was frustrated. I was getting to the point I was going to take up a collection around here.”

On Friday, after calls to local agencies got him a lot of “Gee, we’d like to help, sorry were not funded for it,” he called the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Washington. “They came through without blinking an eye,” said Jacobellis, signing up Gallegos for a special Greyhound Bus program that subsidizes such reunions.

‘Very, Very Happy’

“I am very, very happy,” Gallegos said Friday. “They said they would call me from Washington Monday and explain it all to me.”

Although they have found the daughter--dropped off at Pablo’s sister’s home--police here and in Texas are still looking for the Nicaraguan-born father.

Gallegos was pregnant and living with Pablo in Texas last year when, she says, he beat her up and she fled to her brother’s apartment in Los Angeles. He followed her and “promised to behave himself,” she said, but earlier this month, police say, he beat her, tried to strangle her and, as she lay unconscious, stabbed her repeatedly with a pair of dull scissors, piercing her neck near the jugular vein. “He thought he had killed me,” Gallegos said.

Then he left, taking Katherine. “He left with nothing, nothing for the baby, no clothes. She had only a little shirt on, not even a diaper. . . . He loves her a lot, but to behave like that . . . .”