On 7th Day, a Joyous Family Reunion : Search: Woman, 69, is found in board-and-care home after being missing since last Friday. The owners recognized her from a picture in The Times.

Sara Barroso, the 69-year-old Santa Ana woman who was missing for six days, enjoyed an emotional reunion with her family Thursday after the director of a board-and-care home where she had been staying saw her picture in a newspaper.

Barroso, who was left mute by a stroke last May, had been taken to Holiday Terrace, a Westminster board-and-care facility, on Friday evening after she wandered into the Santa Ana Social Security office looking for help. That was just hours after she had walked away from her daughter’s home in Santa Ana, where she lives.

“You should have seen the reunion, everybody was crying,” said Rebecca Lopez, Holiday Terrace director.

Lopez and Alma Nazareno, the facility’s owner, said Barroso was in good health when she was found. Barroso had her hair trimmed and took advantage of religious services during her brief stay at the facility, Nazareno said.

Barroso suffers partial paralysis in her right hand, and, because of a pronounced limp, walks very slowly with the use of a metal walker. Lopez said that Barroso shakes her head for yes and no, and has extremely limited communication.

At one point during her stay, Barroso indicated that she wanted to remain at Holiday Terrace, officials there said. But after seeing her daughter, she apparently changed her mind.

Lopez recognized Barroso’s photograph in The Times Orange County Edition on Thursday morning and called county authorities, she said.

Patricia Ruiz, Barroso’s daughter, said she was told that when her mother was shown the newspaper article about her disappearance, “she started crying. She is certainly emotional about it.”

Ruiz said finding her mother brought “peace of mind for me. . . . At least on these nights when we’ve been having cold and hail, she’s been OK.”

Ruiz, who is a working mother, said that during her mother’s absence she had learned that she must make an important decision concerning her mother’s need for around-the-clock care.

“In my situation, it’s difficult, especially when you have a job and children. But we’re going to be trying to hire a companion for her who could be with her and accompany her on walks and read to her,” Ruiz said.

A decision on whether to send her mother to stay with relatives in her native Argentina or to place her in a board-and-care home has been postponed until the live-in companion is tried, Ruiz said.

Barroso left her home alone and, according to police, somehow ended up at the federal building in the city’s downtown Civic Center Plaza, a distance of about 5 miles, said Maureen Haacker, a police spokeswoman.

“She could have taken a bus, but we don’t really know how she wound up at the Social Security office,” Haacker said.

At the federal office, two employees befriended Barroso, said Scott Rose, a Social Security spokesman in San Francisco.

“Our two employees interviewed the woman. They could speak both English and Spanish to her. But they found that the woman had very limited speech and couldn’t write either. She was very traumatized at the time, very emotional,” Rose said.

The two employees then contacted several Orange County adult protective agencies on behalf of Barroso. When police were contacted that same day, no missing person report had been filed yet.

“They didn’t want to leave her alone, they did a very fine job,” Rose said.