Some Call Sign a Miracle Image of Slain Girl

The Continis have no doubt.

“It’s a miracle,” Theodora Contini said as she and her husband fixed their eyes on the blurry shape visible on a billboard above Beyer Boulevard in Chula Vista. “I see it. A miracle.”

Less convinced was Vernisha Pepp, a New Orleans native who professes a healthy belief in the supernatural.

“There’s nothing up there,” Pepp insisted. “I just came from happy hour, and I know: There’s nothing up there.”

They were among the more than 1,000 onlookers who descended on a Chula Vista thoroughfare late Thursday in vehicles and on foot, transforming a typically bustling commercial strip into something resembling a stadium parking lot just before the opening kickoff.

What they were looking at is a billboard, painted a blank white, that reflects nothing according to skeptics, but which believers say reveals something miraculous.

What all of them came to gaze upon, they say, is the restful countenance of Laura Arroyo, the 9-year-old girl who disappeared from her San Diego home last month and was murdered in a nightmare scenario that has shaken parents throughout the area.

Since last week, word of the “apparition” has spread, drawing the curious and skeptical, miracle-seekers and naysayers to the site.

Thursday night, Chula Vista police said traffic was backed up on Main Street, which crosses Beyer Boulevard, “to both freeways,” Interstates 5 and 805. The site is about 3 1/2 miles west of I-805. Six officers were assigned to traffic control, police said. No accidents were reported.

The “vision” underscores the fervent emotion surrounding the abduction and killing of the girl, who authorities say disappeared from her family’s South San Diego residence on the evening of June 19, when she went downstairs to answer a ring at the front door.

The third-grader’s battered body, fully clothed, was found shortly after dawn the following day, in front of a business in nearby Chula Vista. She had been stabbed and beaten repeatedly, an autopsy showed.

“There’s been a lot of concern, and empathy, from the community,” said Lt. Merlin Wilson of the Chula Vista Police Department, which has received more than 100 calls on a special tip line set up after the slaying. “Maybe that’s why this billboard phenomenon developed. They want something to happen with the case.”

The crowd at the sign Thursday was swollen as the result of news stories about the billboard Wednesday. Police had no official estimate of the crowd size, but at least several thousand appeared to have made the pilgrimage.

The spectators were mostly Latino, reflecting the population of the South Bay area, but all races and ages were represented. There were gang bangers and grandmothers, grandparents with infants and adults with entire families.

“Maybe God is sending a message that people should stop doing evil things,” said Esperanza Villarreal, who came from San Diego with six grandchildren, all of whom were among the believers.

Above, the play of light and shadows on the billboard could indeed be interpreted as representing a face. Others said they could see several faces--perhaps including the murderer, some suggested.

“You can see whatever you want to see up there,” said Pepp, one of the few who openly expressed skepticism.

In a nearby parking lot, a group of friends from Tijuana huddled around a telescope attempting to focus in on the seeming vision. “Perhaps we Latinos are somewhat more superstitious than others,” explained Miguel Angel Jaramillo as he looked up from the telescope.

To date, one month after the girl’s disappearance, there have been no arrests and there are no known suspects in the case, Lt. Wilson said.

“The frustrating part is that she just disappeared without a sign,” said Wilson, who added that the department has been contacted by several psychics offering their assistance, which so far has been declined. “We don’t have a motive.”

Seeking a logical explanation for the image, Wilson and others postulate that it is likely the result of shadows and lighting cast upon the rectangular billboard, which has been blank--covered by a coat of white paint--since mid-January. Three light fixtures, which automatically illuminate near dusk, sit at the billboard’s base.

“I guess with the coating effect, and the way the light hits the shadows there, people have come up with this image there that has expanded with everyone’s imagination,” said Frank Sanchez, general manager of Martin Outdoor Advertising, the San Diego firm that owns the billboard.

Before being covered in January, Sanchez said, the billboard featured an advertisement for an area food market. He and others initially speculated that the pictorial from the previous display--a plate of food and some ad copy--may have bled through the coating of white paint.

But Sanchez checked: Nothing in the previous advertisement corresponded to anything approaching a girl’s likeness.

The Arroyo family--the girl’s parents and her two older brothers--are among the hundreds who have viewed the billboard on recent evenings.

“When I first heard about it, I didn’t believe it,” recalled the dead girl’s mother, Laura Alicia Mendoza de Arroyo, who, like the father, Luis Arroyo, is an immigrant from Mexico. “I thought it was lies.”

Curious, the family drove to the site on Wednesday evening. Agustin Arroyo, 11, the dead girl’s oldest sibling, promptly recognized his sister’s fuzzy visage, the mother said.

“The boy said, ‘Yes, Mama, it’s Laura! It’s Laura!’ ” the mother recalled.

After spending several hours at the site, she continued, the parents also are convinced that the girl’s features are miraculously superimposed on the sign. They seem to have found some solace in the cloudy likeness.

“I felt sure it was my daughter,” the mother said Thursday. “It looked like she was lying down, asleep.”

How do they explain it?

“I think she wants to tell us something,” said Arroyo, who noted that her husband, Luis, often passes by the site of the billboard on his way to work at a tow truck company. “Maybe she wants to help us find who did it. To press for justice.”