Restaurant Suspended Woman After Her Kidnap : Abduction: Officials say it was a routine inquiry. The manager has been told that she can return to work.

A Taco Bell manager who was kidnaped and robbed of the night’s receipts as she left work in Newhall last week was later suspended from her job.

Sonia Maithonis, 26, of Santa Clarita, who escaped from her kidnaper by jumping from a moving car, said she was suspended for failing to deposit $1,600 in cash receipts in the bank earlier on the evening of Oct. 6.

Maithonis said she was first told she had been fired, but that penalty was later modified to a suspension. The six-year Taco Bell employee said she was notified Tuesday afternoon--following inquiries from The Times--that she was welcome to return to work.

“I’m happy,” she said, but admitted her experience as a crime victim has left her shaken. Elliott Bloom, a spokesman for Taco Bell Corp. in Irvine, said Maithonis will be receiving full pay for the nearly two-week suspension. The suspension was ordered pending an investigation into possible violations of “closing procedures and cash-handling procedures,” he said.

Maithonis is expected to return Friday. Jim DeBoard, the owner of the restaurant, said there must have been “a miscommunication” that caused Maithonis to believe she had been fired. He said the suspension was not ordered for disciplinary reasons, “even though there were some violations” of company procedures.

Bloom said company officials recognized that Maithonis had gone through “a harrowing experience.”

Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies said Maithonis was kidnaped from the parking lot of the restaurant in Newhall at 1:15 a.m. on Oct. 6. A fellow employee had walked her to her car, but when Maithonis slid into the driver’s seat, a gunman appeared and warned off the other worker.

The gunman drove off with Maithonis in the passenger’s seat. The kidnaper drove several miles through Santa Clarita Valley, indicating that he planned to sexually assault her, according to deputies.

When the car slowed to 15 m.p.h. at Placerita Canyon and Sand Canyon roads, Maithonis jumped from the car and the gunman drove away in her 1986 blue Ford Crown Victoria. The man remains at large, but deputies said the car was found Tuesday on Sand Canyon Road.

Maithonis said operating procedures call for her to take receipts to the bank at 8 p.m. But she said she could not leave because the employees she supervised were unable to run the business alone.

“I told my supervisor the two kids cannot handle it because they cannot speak English,” she said.

DeBoard owns 16 Taco Bell restaurants in Orange, Los Angeles and Ventura counties. He said he could not discuss the violations of procedures that Maithonis had committed, but said she had been exonerated in the investigation. “She’s been a good employee for us,” he said.

DeBoard said the suspension is a routine practice in such cases, allowing officials to look into the circumstances of the case. He said the safety and security of employees is the company’s first consideration.

Mike Monzon, the district manager for the restaurant on Lyons Avenue, downplayed the kidnaping as a factor in the handling of the case. “She wasn’t really kidnaped,” he said. “The guy took her and she got away.”

But being a crime victim has had a severe effect on the soft-spoken woman. “My mind is not right,” she said. She said she is frightened of returning to work but wants to do so to get over the experience.