Families of Missing Haunted by Riots : Aftermath: Ashes leave no clue to the fate of three people still unaccounted for. Bodies of three others are unidentified.

Beneath a rising cloud of dust at the corner of South Vermont Avenue and 58th Place, Elizabeth Blanding watches as a pair of tractors scoop dirt, concrete--and what she believes are the charred remains of her daughter--into a gaping, truck-sized dumpster.

On the first night of the riots, Angela Powell went out to loot the furniture and appliance store that once occupied the lot. The building burned to the ground that night; Powell never was seen again.

For months, workers combed the broken hulk, searching for some trace of her remains. But finally, the search was ended, the tractors called to clear the site.

“They’re taking her away and dumping her someplace,” Blanding says, looking on as the rumbling machinery scrapes the lot into a dusty, empty slate. “If I could just dig enough, maybe I could find something--a shoe, a piece of her clothes. Not to find anything, that’s a terrifying thing.”

During the days of rioting that consumed the city, 108 people were reported missing to the Los Angeles Police Department. One by one, almost all were found.

Eliseo Villarreal of Pacoima turned up four days after relatives reported him missing, explaining he had locked himself in his apartment during the riots and refused to answer the phone, police said. It took nearly a week to find Carlos Gamez, a Kaiser Permanente worker, in a hospital recovering from injuries he sustained during the upheaval, according to authorities.

After four months, the fate of only three people and the identities of three others remain unresolved: Three people who were reported missing to police have not been located. Three others whose bodies were found in the rubble of the riots are mystery figures.

“We wait and we wait for him to come home,” says Jose Blanco, whose younger brother, William, disappeared on the second night of the riots. “My mother asks me, ‘Why doesn’t he write anymore? He is really ungrateful. He could at least send a letter.’ ”

Says Blanco: “I am still looking for the right words to tell her.”

*

In an area where so many come and go unnoticed each day--not only drifters but average people whose lives, in Southern California fashion, seem tied to no one and nothing in particular--the number of human mysteries lingering from the riots is relatively small.

The Los Angeles Police Department receives about 300 missing persons reports a month, 85% of which eventually are resolved. At the Los Angeles County coroner’s office, John, Jane, Baby and Undetermined Does collect at an unrelenting pace. Last year, the office collected the bodies of 348 Does, all but 82 of whom ultimately were identified.

Most Does and missing persons fall into predictable categories of the detached and disaffected--runaways, domestic squabblers, patients who wander from nursing homes, drug users, transients, illegal immigrants.

Angela Powell was different. She had turned 22 only three days before the riots and was set to start a new job with the Postal Service a few weeks later. If she was impatient or headstrong, she was dependable; Powell’s mother never worried that she might be snared by gangs, drugs or any of the other violent traps of modern life.

On the first night of the riots, Powell left her grandparents’ home in South Los Angeles at 7:30, saying she was going to the movies with her boyfriend.

It was probably a lie, her mother says.

Instead, the two ended up driving the flaming streets, watching the looting that was going on all around them. “You know, they’re kids,” Blanding says. “They were curious.”

The temptation to loot overcame the pair as they passed the Hall’s/New Guys furniture and appliance store on South Vermont Avenue, according to the boyfriend, William Arnold.

They entered the store holding hands, but were separated by the crowds and a sudden burst of smoke that rushed through the building. Suddenly, they could see nothing, and they heard only the sound of screaming looters scrambling to escape. Arnold says he could hear her calling out his name as he crawled on the floor toward the back of the building where there was less smoke.

As the smoke grew more intense, Arnold and others broke through a back door. The front of the building was completely ablaze.

For an hour, Arnold waited terrified outside the building, then left to see if Powell would call him at home.

She never did.

“I cried, just hoping she would call,” Arnold says. “I kind of knew what happened, but I didn’t want to believe it.”

The next day, Blanding went to the still-smoldering ruins to search for her daughter. The roof of the block-sized building had collapsed, covering the ground in three feet of debris.

She had no idea where to start.

Blanding returned to the lot to poke through the rubble as often as she could. She checked the county jail half a dozen times, hoping her daughter had been arrested.

Not a trace.

She used to drive past what was left of the store every day on her way home from work, just to take a look--and, maybe, to hold on a little to the hope that some trace of Angela would be found.

After the lot was cleared last month, even that sliver of hope is gone.

“There’s nothing there anymore,” the mother says. “No reason to go that way at all.”

*

For some relatives of the missing, such as the family of 29-year-old William S. Blanco, even the bitter reality of death would be a relief of sorts after four months of waiting.

Blanco left El Salvador a decade ago to escape the civil war and find a better life in the United States. He was a drinker and a troublemaker--and stubborn as well, says his brother, Jose. The youngest child in a family that already had lost two in the Salvadoran war, William was his mother’s favorite. “To her, he was the perfect son,” Jose says.

On the second day of the riots, William Blanco took off with a truckload of friends to join in the looting.

His brother wanted to stop him. But the two men had been quarreling over William’s drinking, and they said nothing to one other. William returned once with his friends, but left again without a word.

The Blancos began worrying when William failed to come home by morning. At first, they figured he had been arrested for looting. But after a week of waiting and several checks at the County Jail, the family grew fearful that something far more serious had happened. Jose Blanco reported his brother missing to police.

Since then, Jose has tried to question William’s friends about that day in the streets. But they have given him vague answers, leaving him more confused and suspicious of William’s fate.

He has gone to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service on the chance that William was put in detention, although he is a permanent resident of the United States. He has gone to the local refugee agencies and police stations around their home.

Each time, nothing.

Their mother calls occasionally from El Salvador, and Jose has played an increasingly painful game, telling her each time that William is busy and cannot come to the phone.

“I know I have to tell her soon,” he says. “But I want to be really sure. She will really feel this . . . three sons lost.”

*

Perhaps most vexing are the unidentified bodies at the coroner’s office.

Three remain, though some investigators believe there will be more as the cleanup continues.

They are known by only numbers: John Doe No. 80, John Doe No. 172 and Undetermined Doe No. 9--the last a set of remains so scant that investigators have been unable to determine whether it is male or female.

The coroner’s office started with about half a dozen unidentified bodies after the riots, according to Nick G. Romero, a coroner’s investigator.

Most were identified within a few days.

William Ross, whose body was found in a burned liquor store on 9th Street on May 1, was identified 10 days later through dental records. The charred body of Juan Salgado was identified after a week through a tattoo on his back and a television repair receipt that investigators found in his pocket.

The three remaining cases have not gone as smoothly.

* John Doe No. 80 was found May 2 in a burned out Pep Boys store on South Vermont Avenue that had been torched a few days earlier.

Investigators succeeded in lifting a single print from the body’s left middle finger--a critical piece of information in the identification process. In addition, they X-rayed the body’s teeth and recovered from the scene a pair of blue bikini underwear, a .38-caliber bullet casing and parts of a pair of blue jeans.

* The remains of John Doe No. 172 were found last month beneath a layer of ash and rubble in what was a J.J. Newberry store on Western Avenue. Along with a set of dental X-rays, investigators have a pair of white pants, a green cloth belt and buckle and a T-shirt taken from the body.

In both cases, the information is more than enough to identify a body; it has proven enough to rule out that the remains are those of Powell, Blanco or Francisco Javier Sanchez Ramos, a 39-year-old Guatemalan immigrant who vanished on the second day of the riots.

But investigators have been stymied by a shortage of leads on whose these bodies might be.

“We’ve got plenty,” Romero says. “It’s just that no one seems to have reported these people missing.”

The most difficult case has been that of Undetermined Doe No. 9--the top of a skull with black hair and part of a right arm.

The remains were found Aug. 29 near a burned-out strip mall on West Pico Boulevard. Workers already had cleared much of the debris. But on that day, they noticed a new pile of rubble on a nearby lot.

Investigators believe Undetermined Doe No. 9 died at a different location and was illegally dumped on the lot.

“Realistically, this is going to be tough,” Romero says. “You don’t have much to go on sometimes. It happens.”

Romero, a former Los Angeles police detective, says he never completely gives up on a case. There’s always some hope, he says, that a new lead will turn up and a name finally attached to a body or a box of ashes.

But in some cases, Romero concedes, there comes a point where the chance of identification begins to slip into the realm of the incredible.

Stacked on a cabinet in the coroner’s office is a pile of plain ledger books containing the name of each Doe that has passed through the building over the years.

The books are filled with cases that no one realistically expects to resolve anymore: Fetus found 10-2-67 Greyhound Bus station. Charred body 2-7-70 found 747 S. Burlington, Los Angeles. And thousands more.

After checking missing persons reports, fingerprints, dental records and body X-rays, all that’s left to do sometimes, Romero says, is wait.

The remains are held for several months and then sent to the Los Angeles County Crematory to make room for new bodies. The ashes are stored for three years in tiny metal boxes stacked in a room next to the cremation ovens with a few thousand others.

If no one comes, the ashes finally are buried in a common grave marked only by the year in a cemetery off East 1st Street.

Still Unresolved

Three people are missing and three bodies remain unidentified in the aftermath of the Los Angeles riots:

Angela Powell, 22

Background: Powell was last seen by her boyfriend as she tried to escape from a burning furniture and appliance store on the first night of the riots, April 29.

Status: Investigators combed the wreckage of the building on South Vermont Avenue but could find no trace of Powell’s body. She is still listed by police as missing.

*

Francisco Javier Sanchez Ramos, 39

Background: Sanchez disappeared on the second day of the riots. Friends reported seeing the recent immigrant from Guatemala on the street that afternoon near his family’s apartment on West Adams Boulevard.

Status: His last paycheck from work was never picked up, and his family has not heard from him.

*

William S. Blanco, 29

Background: Blanco left his apartment on Country Club Drive near the Mid-City district with a group of friends to go looting on the second day of the riots, his family says.

Status: Blanco never returned. Several of his friends have denied being with the immigrant from El Salvador that afternoon, leaving the family more confused about his fate.

John Doe No. 80: The body of an unidentified Anglo or Latino male was found May 2 inside a Pep Boys store near South Vermont Avenue and 58th Street. The store reportedly was burned by looters on the second day of the riots. Investigators recovered pieces of denim pants, light blue underwear and a .38-caliber casing in a pants pocket. The body was cremated July 22.

John Doe No. 172: On Aug. 12, a demolition crew clearing rubble inside the J. J. Newberry store at 1601 S. Western Ave. stumbled on the charred and decomposed body of an Anglo or Latino male believed to be in his 20s. The store was burned on the first night of the riots. The body was clothed in a T-shirt and white pants with a green cloth belt.

Undetermined Doe No. 9: Workers cleaning a burned strip-mall in the 2200 block of West Pico Boulevard Aug. 29 found an arm and a skull in a pile of debris. The workers had cleared out much of the rubble and found the remains in a pile that apparently had been brought there from another location. The victim had black hair and was wearing a brown sweater. Investigators have been unable to determine the sex.

SOURCE: Los Angeles County coroner’s office, LAPD