Alone in L.A., Villager Finds Kidnaped Sister

Marcelino Benitez, 29, was terrified the minute his boss at the Thai restaurant in Houston told him his mother was on the phone. For her to get to a telephone in her tiny Mexican town and place an international call meant something was dreadfully wrong.

His instinct was right.

A man from their village had come with a gun and kidnaped Marcelino’s youngest sister, age 14, and was reportedly heading to California.

“Don’t worry, mama,” he vowed in that kitchen last month. “I will do everything within my power--and within the power of the Americans’ laws--to find her.”

Benitez knew nothing of the purported kidnaper except his name: Agustin Ramirez. He had no address, no city, no clue.

But by late Friday afternoon, with a combination of cleverness, tenacity and love, Benitez led sheriff’s deputies to a grimy barbecue takeout joint east of Watts. And there, in the kitchen, was his little sister.

For more than a month, sheriff’s deputies say, she had been held as a sex slave, forced to work in the barbecue restaurant run by her alleged captor’s brothers and kept in line by threats that her mother would be killed if she failed to comply.

On Saturday, the slightly built Benitez, sat in a Santa Ana apartment, telling a story that just two days ago, he said, he had trouble making authorities take seriously. He had the air of a man who had simply done what needed to be done.

He had walked into a metropolis with dozens of police departments, thousands of social service agencies and millions of strangers--and managed to take the law into his own hands without violating it.

“Many times people lose children, lose family members and don’t do anything,” Benitez said. “I beg them to try, to attempt, through all means possible.”

His hunt began after a younger brother was sent to Houston from their village in the state of Puebla, south of Mexico City, with a photograph of the alleged captor.

From his childhood, Benitez remembered the man as a member of a large family of strong, tough brothers. He began asking other villagers who are working in Texas and one remembered that the Ramirez brothers had a restaurant somewhere in the Los Angeles area.

On March 2, three days after his mother’s call, he was on a plane. As he landed in Los Angeles, the expanse of lights below made the task seem impossible. He had never been to Los Angeles and had no address of anyone who lives here. His hope was to find someone who spoke Spanish in a restaurant who would help him track down his sister’s captor.

He spent his first night alone on a concrete bench by the passenger loading zone at Los Angeles International Airport, pretending to be waiting for someone.

When daylight came, he bought maps and began his search, finding places to stay by stopping people with Latino faces and asking if they were from Puebla.

Not until the third day did he find a fellow Poblano --a young man from a village near his own. In time, the man, who asked that his name not be used, would join the search.

At first, Benitez had planned to report the kidnaping and enlist the help of police. But negotiating the welter of area codes and jurisdictions seemed impossible. We cannot help you unless you bring us an address, police told him.

Information operators became his helpers; voices without faces who listened to his story and offered suggestions. He wrote down their suggestions on scraps of paper he carried in a plastic bag.

When none could help, he took up a post on Broadway near Grand Central Market. With so many Mexicans passing by, he thought Ramirez might be one.

Two fruitless days later, he found a Yellow Pages directory in a telephone booth and looked up restaurants. He checked quickly for the name Ramirez , hoping to find a Ramirez Mexican restaurant. There was none. He checked under Hermanos Ramirez, hoping to find a Ramirez Brothers restaurant.

Finally, he resorted to calling.

“I would pretend to place an order ‘to go’ and then ask what name I should ask for when I picked up my order,” Benitez said Saturday. “That way, I thought I would get the name of the people who worked there.”

After dozens of wasted calls, he took to the streets. Armed with his bus maps and telephone directories, he traveled up and down thoroughfares, checking out a dozen or more restaurants every hour--Gardena, Compton, Santa Ana, La Mirada.

Often, he would feel compelled to order, only to be so heartsick that he could not eat. “I kept telling myself I wasn’t scared,” he said. “I couldn’t be scared because I had my freedom. It was my sister who had a right to be scared. And I just had to find her alive, before something bad happened to her.”

He thought of going to the newspapers and television, but feared that Ramirez would flee with his sister. Or worse.

So, he kept trudging, hoping to find someone in one of those restaurants who spoke Spanish and might help him. The image of his little sister--an 11-year-old with long, dark hair when he last saw her--haunted him. He kept on not only for her, but for his mother.

By last Friday, he had canvassed 300 or 400 restaurants.

Seeing his face and his determination, the fellow Poblano , who had offered Benitez lodging, joined the search.

The first time Benitez had ridden the bus down Imperial Highway, he passed by the shabby carryout restaurant called Mom’s Bar-B-Q, thinking it was closed. Signs on the white, dilapidated building boasted hickory smoked ribs, chicken and links, but the walls outside the wooden shack were scribbled with graffiti.

Something about the area made him feel unsafe.

Much of the neighborhood has a feel of abandonment and disrepair. Around one corner is a mini-mall with a barbershop, a fast-food restaurant and other stores. Across the street, Villy’s used tire shop is closed. Down the street, a chain-link fence surrounding an abandoned gas station is covered with signs advertising for jobs and junk cars.

An asphalt parking lot, which Mom’s shared with Lake Liquor Store, attracted locals who dropped by to exchange greetings, share gossip and sell drugs. There were a few Anglo faces, some brown-skinned people like himself and mostly black men who looked frightening to Benitez.

There, behind the heavily grated window, was a face that looked familiar.

“It’s him!” he thought.

Then doubt crossed his mind. Maybe it was not him, he thought. He retreated from the restaurant to scrutinize the photograph once again. Still uncertain, he paid a passerby to place an order for ribs--and to make sure she got the name of the manager.

“Ramirez,” she was told was the manager’s name. She was told to ask for Agustin when she returned to pick up her order at 3 p.m.

Benitez had no time to rejoice. “If I don’t do something now, I never will,” he thought to himself. “Now is the time.”

From his bag, he quickly fished out the card of a Gardena policeman who had told him to return only when he had an address. His friend drove him to Gardena. But the detective refused to help him, something about no arrest warrant and jurisdictional obstacles.

“I felt terrible,” he said, “like no one in the United States would help me.”

When he left, he called the Los Angeles County Info Line, one of the numbers he had tried early in his search. A woman named Delia gave him the address for the sheriff’s Lennox station. There, he talked a detective into sending a patrol car to the barbecue stand.

For the first time since he left Houston on his quest, events moved of their own momentum. He was no longer alone.

When deputies arrived at Mom’s Bar-B-Q they asked to see Agustin Ramirez. He walked out, and behind him was the most heartening moment of Benitez’s life: His little sister. How little she is still, he thought. Just a little girl.

She looked from him to Ramirez and back again. She could not cry or talk. Her face seemed blank.

“You’re protected now,” he tried to tell his sister as they stood for awkward minutes outside the restaurant. “He can’t do anything more to you.”

Still, the girl would not speak. Finally, a deputy gestured toward Ramirez and asked the girl a question: “Do you want to stay with him?”

The girl shook her head from side to side.

While her alleged captor was taken to the Lennox station, the girl was transported to a hospital, where it was determined that she had been sexually assaulted at least 20 times. The Sheriff’s Department said she was a sex slave who was not allowed to use a telephone or go anywhere alone.

Ramirez, 31, is being held in lieu of $100,000 on suspicion of kidnaping a child for sex, sodomy and sex crimes against children.

Sheriff’s Deputy Benita Hinojos said that they did not know whether the other restaurant employees knew of the girl’s abduction or her condition, but that they are investigating the issue.

As for Benitez, the deputies could only marvel.

“He beat some pretty incredible odds,” said Lt. Bob Hudson, watch commander at the Lennox station. “I just hope that the court system and the legal system can do its best by his efforts.”

Times staff writers Anne C. Roark and Jonathan Gaw contributed to this story.