Mother Bids Slain Daughter Goodby : Tragedy: Friends and relatives pay their respects to a 16-year-old Cypress girl found strangled last week. Police are no closer to explaining her death.

As cemetery workers Monday prepared to lower the casket of a Cypress girl who was strangled last week, a relative approached the mother of the 16-year-old victim to try to lead her away from the grave.

The prayers had already been said, the condolences offered, the funeral conducted, but the mother, Bertha Velasquez, would not leave, not yet. It was, she said, her last chance to be with her daughter, Zuleima Valdez, and she was not going to let the moment go quickly.

“Adios, adios!” the Colombian native cried in a mournful wail that brought onlookers to tears.

But even as friends and relatives paid their respects to the Cypress High School student, neither they nor police were any closer to explaining her death.

Teen-agers cycling along a path on the Coyote Creek flood control channel in Lakewood on the afternoon of March 19 found Zuleima’s fully clothed body, partially hidden by pine needles. The high school freshman had been missing since the night before, when she told her mother she was going to the beach with friends.

An autopsy revealed that the teen-ager was strangled, but Los Angeles County sheriff’s investigators say they have few leads in the case.

However, investigators in Los Angeles and Orange counties are examining Zuleima’s death and the strangulation of a former Long Beach woman whose body was found last week in Laguna Hills to see if there is a connection.

The Laguna Hills victim was Lori Mae Calhoun, 41. When authorities last week knocked on the door of a Lakewood address where Calhoun was thought to have stayed, a man living there shot himself to death.

The man, Steve C. Walters, 30, is now suspected of having strangled Calhoun, investigators said. However, they say they have little evidence thus far to link the deaths of Calhoun and Zuleima.

“The investigators are working a lot of different angles, and that connection is one of the possibilities,” said Lt. John Schaefer of the Cypress Police Department. “But right now we don’t have any new leads.”

Monday morning, as a Cypress police officer stood watch outside Zuleima’s funeral at St. Irenaeus Catholic Church, about 200 of her friends, classmates and family members inside sought answers of their own. The answers were few in coming.

“This is wrong. This is stupid. This is senseless,” the Rev. John McAndrew said. “People get angry saying, ‘Why?’ This type of tragedy evokes inner fear and feelings in us. It’s not supposed to happen when you’re 16 years old.”

Classmates who attended the funeral said Cypress High School has been rife with rumors since Zuleima’s death--about who might have done it, how and why. But they added that no one seems to have any real clues to the killing.

“I just can’t figure it out,” said Dennis Roberts, 16, a friend. “She knew better than to go out (to the flood control channel) by herself at night. Someone must have taken her there.”

Added Christopher Wilson, 18, of Long Beach, a friend who plays basketball at the Cypress mobile home park where Zuleima lived: “It’s a mystery why someone would do this. . . . She was so sweet and friendly. She didn’t do no drugs. I’ve never even seen her taking a beer or a cigarette. She was just happy-go-lucky.”