Search Continues for Boy, 4, Lost at Bus Terminal : Disappearance: Intensive effort fails to turn up clues that could lead police to Matthew Vera. The child vanished early Friday at Greyhound station Downtown.

The last time Rosa Sanchez saw her 4 year-old son, Matthew, he asked for a quarter, the price of a video game.

It was just after dawn Friday and Matthew was giddy with excitement, on the last leg of an adventure that had taken the boy and his mother from Stockton to the Greyhound bus terminal in a seedy slice of Downtown Los Angeles.

Before too long, the child hoped, he would be at his grandmother’s house in Pacoima with his four brothers and sisters, his aunts and uncles and his cousins. If things worked out, they would move there for good.

But when Sanchez returned from carrying the last of their luggage to the gate through which they would head for the San Fernando Valley, Matthew Vera was gone. And by late Saturday, he still had not returned.

A search of the terminal’s small video arcade, the men’s and women’s bathrooms and the front and back of the station turned up nothing. Everybody questioned by Sanchez--and later, by police--said they had not seen the child.

It happened so quickly, without so much as a scream that a mother could hear, that Sanchez initially had trouble believing her youngest child was really gone.

“It was only maybe 10, 15 minutes that I was gone,” she said, nervously fingering a Spanish language prayer book as tears spilled from her eyes. “I did have some hope, but that was (Friday). I know that my son just doesn’t go off. We’ve been there so many times and nothing ever happens. I don’t know anything anymore.”

Disheartened Los Angeles police officers said Saturday that they had no clues that could lead them to Matthew. After more than 100 officers had scoured the area surrounding the terminal, hope, too, was running dry.

The all-points bulletins had gone out, the outbound buses had been checked, as had the morgue and the hospitals. The Border Patrol got the word. Flyers and photos were delivered door to door. But by early Saturday, the efforts had wound down.

*

Sgt. Alexander Gomez, at a command center in the bus terminal, shrugged as he said: “When you don’t find him in 24 hours, you lose hope.”

Gomez said five search-and-rescue dogs followed Matthew’s scent to the fence behind the station, then stopped. The trail was cold. “So our hunch is he didn’t walk out of here, he was driven out.”

Matthew, who has a small scar on his stomach from a recent hernia operation, weighs 40 pounds and stands 3 feet, 6 inches tall. He has dark eyes and dark hair and his relatives say he is very easy with a smile. Although he speaks primarily Spanish, he understands English.

When he disappeared, he was wearing a blue sweater, a green striped T-shirt and blue jeans. His tennis shoes had Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on them. The turtles, and Barney the dinosaur, are among the child’s favorites.

Detective Dick Heidesch, who is heading the investigation, said roughly 100 people were in the terminal when Matthew disappeared about 6:45 a.m. Friday. Although he said it is common for young children to become lost at the terminal, most are found soon.

“We had 72 missings, most of them runaways, in the Newton area (of Downtown) last month,” Heidesch said. “We’ve found 75% of them so far. But a 4-year-old child gone for this long, that doesn’t happen every day.”

Police said they were ruling out almost nothing in the disappearance. They even questioned Sanchez, who is separated from Matthew’s father, for more than three hours Saturday. Then they gave her a polygraph test.

After emerging from the interrogation with Sanchez, Heidesch said he felt “very good” about the results of the test.

“She never was a suspect,” he said. “It is an investigative technique. We’ve tried everything else. . . . We’ll just keep looking.”

Sanchez, 35, said police suggested that she was not telling all she knew about her son’s disappearance.

“They kept asking me if I was afraid of something,” she said. “They would ask if I did something stupid, like go outside and get a taco and leave him inside. I didn’t do that. I take care of my kids.”

*

Sanchez said she was not certain that Matthew went to play a video game, but that she assumed he would. In the arcade at the terminal, there is a small camera with a sign, in English and Spanish, that the room is electronically monitored.

But terminal officials said the camera is nothing more than a fancy peephole. It carries no film.

Such revelations only added to the despair of Matthew’s extended family gathered at police headquarters as his mother was being questioned upstairs.

They had been planning on traveling to the hospital to console Sanchez’s ill father. He learned of his grandson’s disappearance via the television news.

“At first, I had hope that somebody would find Matthew,” said Lupe Garcia, Sanchez’s sister, as her face crumpled in tears. “But now, I think, definitely, I think. . . . It’s over. I just pray that God wouldn’t let anything bad happen to him.”

Sanchez said she and her five children moved last year to Stockton after she and her husband separated. She hoped to find “tranquillity and a new start” there.

“But then we got thrown out of our apartment, and then Matthew had his (hernia) operation, and now this,” she said. Then her voice broke off.