Alleged Slayer of Santa Ana Girl Is Seized in San Antonio

A Los Angeles man has been arrested in Texas on suspicion of murdering Nadia Puente, the 9-year-old Santa Ana girl who was abducted two weeks ago on her way home from school.

Richard Lucio DeHoyos, 31, was arrested Saturday by San Antonio and Santa Ana police at a taco stand in Santa Antonio, but escaped the next day. He was arrested again less than an hour later sitting on a bus bench a few blocks from the jail, according to police and other reports.

Since his arrest, DeHoyos has told newspaper and TV reporters in San Antonio that he killed Nadia in a Santa Ana hotel room.

“DeHoyos has been positively linked to the murder through physical evidence found at the scene,” said Santa Ana Police Chief Paul M. Walters at a news conference Monday. Walters and other police officials declined to elaborate on the evidence that led them to DeHoyos, who police said was a drifter who has lived in Los Angeles, Santa Ana and other parts of Orange County during the last few years.

They did say, however, that a gray 1989 Nissan coupe belonging to DeHoyos matched the description of a car seen by students at Nadia’s school and found later at Los Angeles International Airport. It has been impounded by police and will be searched for evidence, Walters said.

DeHoyos waived extradition at a court hearing in San Antonio Monday. He should be flown back to Santa Ana within a few days, Walters said.

DeHoyos’ grandmother, contacted at her home in Los Angeles, said her grandson went to San Antonio to visit his mother about two weeks ago.

Nadia, a fourth-grader at Diamond Elementary School, disappeared March 20 on her way home from school and was found the next day in Griffith Park by transients. An autopsy found that she had been sexually molested and killed by having an object pressed against her chest.

Shortly after his arrest, DeHoyos told reporters that he had killed the girl in a Santa Ana hotel room.

“I drowned her in a bathtub,” he calmly told a reporter from the San Antonio Light Sunday night. “I didn’t know her. I just picked her up.”

The newspaper reported Monday that DeHoyos said he was on cocaine when he committed the murder. “I was angry,” DeHoyos told the newspaper. “I’d lost my job. I was out of my mind.”

A Los Angeles coroner’s office spokesman said DeHoyos’ statement that he drowned the girl in a bathtub was not inconsistent with the autopsy findings.

“He might have pressed her chest and then put her in the water,” spokesman Bob Dambacher said. “The object (that was pressed against her chest) could very well have been the floor . . . or the floor of the bathtub.”

DeHoyos managed to escape after his initial arrest by wadding up a piece of paper and sticking it in the lock of his jail cell, Bexar County Jail administrator Tom Barry told the San Antonio Express News.

Sunday night, jailers discovered that DeHoyos was missing and issued an all-points bulletin for the murder suspect.

He was found about an hour later at a bus bench a few blocks from the jail.

DeHoyos’ grandmother said her grandson had been raised in San Antonio and had come to Los Angeles after spending time in Central America. His uncle got him a job at a glass factory, but DeHoyos left the job because of “difficulties,” she said.