LOCAL : Missing Boy, 2, Found Unhurt in Parking Lot

A 2-year-old boy missing 16 hours after disappearing from an Easter carnival at a Sunland park was found this morning wandering in a Panorama City parking lot about 10 miles away, Los Angeles police said.

Jesse Salazar of Sunland appeared to be unharmed and was in good spirits when reunited with his mother and father at Sunland Park about 10:15 a.m. Police said the boy will undergo a medical examination to determine if he was injured.

When a police car pulled into the park and the boy was handed over to his mother and father, he was immediately surrounded by a crush of relatives and media. Several of the relatives were crying as they kissed the boy or called, “Hi, Jesse! Hi, Jesse!”

Although they said the boy could not have walked from Sunland to Panorama City, police stopped short of calling the boy’s disappearance a kidnaping. Police said the boy is too young to tell them what happened.

Capt. Tim McBride said detectives were investigating a report that Jesse had been seen earlier with a group of people at the shopping center where he was found in the 8400 block of Van Nuys Boulevard. It was unclear whether the group, which police said was a family, had kidnaped the boy or had found him wandering alone and took care of him. The family has not been found by police.

“We don’t know what we have,” McBride said. “It is hard to tell what he has been through. As far as the people he was with . . . they might be involved in a kidnap or they might have been Good Samaritans. They could have gotten scared that they would be accused of kidnaping and left the boy.”

Jesse disappeared about 5:30 p.m. Sunday, shortly after he arrived with his mother and father, Patricia and Jesse Salazar Sr., both 19, at the park in the 8600 block of Foothill Boulevard, police said. The family intended to have a picnic and attend the park’s Easter carnival.

“They were just on an Easter outing,” McBride said. “As the mother and father were unloading things from the car, the boy got excited and ran over to the carnival. He disappeared.”

Police were called and an intensive search followed. More than 50 officers, family members, several concerned citizens and members of the Citizen Emergency Mobile Patrol searched the park and surrounding neighborhoods through the night.

The search continued until this morning. Police declined to identify the person who found the boy.

“I’m just very, very happy,” said Jesse Salazar Sr., as he waited with other family members at the park after hearing that his son had been found.