Kidnapers Stole Christmas, Too : Abduction: A little girl who was grabbed from a street in Oceanside nearly a year ago is still missing. Her gifts from 1989 make this a season without cheer for her family.

Her gifts from last Christmas sit unopened, and sometimes her little brother cries out for her in the night. But always, there is no answer.

One year and thousands of police leads later, Leticia Hernandez, 8, is still missing and, if she is still alive, is believed to be somewhere in vastly forested northern Florida with the kidnapers who grabbed her from an Oceanside street a year ago Sunday.

“In other homes there will be parties and happiness, but not here,” Leticia’s mother said softly in Spanish. “There will be no Christmas, there will be nothing.”

It has been a whole year of soaring hopes and crashing disappointments for the mother, also named Leticia, after 18 sightings of her child abruptly ended last May, when the trail vanished into the Florida outback.

Oceanside Police Department spokesman Bob George said the 14 investigators who once worked to solve the kidnaping have now dwindled to one dedicated, hard-working detective who needs a break in the frustrating case.

“Even though there are no verifiable leads or sightings doesn’t mean we’re disheartened,” said George. “With a case like this, you just can’t quit.”

Leticia, or “Tita” as her family affectionately calls her, had wandered from the Hernandez’s cramped apartment on Bush Street and headed for a local park while her mother was distracted by chores. The girl never returned.

So far, the national media coverage, the descriptions of two suspected abductors, the once-promising trail of sightings, the blizzard of leaflets with Leticia’s photograph--all have failed to deliver the Hernandez family from pain.

“For me, it has been difficult to go on, but I have to go on for the sake of my family,” said the girl’s 33-year-old mother, who shares the family apartment with Leticia’s sister, five brothers and grandmother. The child’s father, Rodolfo Martinez, travels back and forth between the home in Oceanside and his job as a farm worker in Sacramento.

Time has been an oppressive blur of the past and present, of two Christmases made bitter and cruel.

When Leticia disappeared, the family kept the decorated Christmas tree, hoping that once she returned they would celebrate a Christmas of joyful reunion. The months slowly passed, and finally the dry and sadly drooping tree was taken away in the summer. The presents from that Christmas remain stacked at the edge of the living room.

Now it is Christmastime again, but this year, Hernandez said, “There will not even be a tree.”

Although the Christmas reminders are especially hard, Leticia’s absence haunts the family every day, especially her 5-year-old brother, Daniel.

“Daniel called her at night and looked for her,” said grandmother Victoria Gonzelez de Hernandez. “He’d wake up crying.”

Between the day of the kidnaping and last May 22, Leticia was seen 18 times at rest stops, gas stations, campgrounds and similar places between Buckman Springs, east of San Diego, and High Springs, Fla.

Her abductors are described as a white male, aged 30 to 35, about 5-feet, 10-inches tall, 220 to 250 pounds, with blond shoulder-length hair and a cross tattooed on the back of one hand.

A female accomplice is described as in her mid-30s with bleached blonde, collar-length hair, 5-feet, 10-inches tall and weighing about 130 pounds. On one occasion, the couple was seen with another woman described as white, in her mid-40s with slightly graying curly brown hair.

“We still believe they’re probably in the northern Florida area,” George said. “The problem is, it’s a densely forested, swampy area. She could be 10 feet from somebody and they’d never see her.”

George said police are assuming Leticia is alive simply because, “We don’t have anything to tell us she’s not.”

She is believed to be in northern Florida because the leads still coming in are mostly from that area, George said, “but there’s nothing we can say is a sighting.”

George said investigators, including the FBI agent assigned to the kidnaping, need a break to get further in the case. “We’ve needed that from the beginning,” George said.

Any promising tips are checked, a time-consuming process.

Oceanside Police Lt. Ron Call spent most of last Tuesday dealing with a brief spot on television’s “A Current Affair” that showed a woman sought in a series of killings in Florida.

Viewers phoned the station to report that the woman resembled Leticia’s kidnaper, and Call wound up spending hours checking the information and fending off reporters.

“Yes, the composite (drawing) looks close, but there’s no connection with the Leticia Hernandez case,” he said. “We’re not even investigating whether they’re linked at all.”

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has gotten tips regularly on the case, hundreds of them since the kidnaping, according to Bob Ermini, the center’s director of case management.

The center, cooperating with Oceanside police, has helped print and distribute in Florida 250,000 flyers with Leticia’s picture.

In Oceanside, one of the many people who have taken a personal interest in Leticia is Police Officer Chris McDonough, who recorded a song to help raise reward money to solve the case. The reward fund stands at $18,500.

The Hernandez family is already planning for Leticia’s return.

“We will have her forget, and have her forget the people she was with . . . and live a normal life like before,” said her grandmother.