Boy Found Safe With Man Involved in Earlier Case

A 3-year-old Indio boy, missing since he disappeared from a Downtown video arcade on Christmas Day, was safely reunited with his parents Monday--ending a nine-day ordeal for his parents, but posing a tangle of thorny questions for investigators.

It turns out that the day laborer who says he found Andrew Rodriguez is the same man who was hailed as a hero after he found a missing 4-year-old four weeks ago. Detectives are trying to determine if the “hero” kidnaped Andrew, Los Angeles Police Lt. Louis Trovato said.

The man was released late Monday because there was not enough evidence to charge him, Los Angeles Police Department spokesman Officer Don Cox said, adding that the investigation is continuing.

The child was not harmed, police said. “He was checked at the hospital and everything is OK,” Trovato said. “He’s fine . . . happy and content, but he hasn’t been able to tell us anything.”

The man who found Andrew identified himself to authorities as Jose Jimenez when he found Matthew Vera, 4, after the child disappeared from the Downtown Greyhound bus station Dec. 4.

In an interview two weeks ago, however, the man told The Times that his name is Enrique Palma Lopez.

Matthew was found Dec. 6 after being missing for 40 hours, and detectives are reopening their investigation of that case, Trovato said. A medical examination showed that Matthew, like Andrew, had not been sexually molested or otherwise harmed.

Lopez called detectives at 7 a.m. Monday, saying he had found Andrew at Broadway and 6th Street, Trovato said. “Our main concern is how the gentleman discovered the boy,” he said. “That gentleman either found him or abducted him.”

Asked about skepticism that the same man could find two missing children in four weeks, Lopez said after he was released: “It’s only bingo--good luck.”

Safe in his mother’s arms, Andrew emerged from the LAPD’s Central Division station shortly after 1 p.m. with his father and several other relatives in tow.

“Right now, I feel happy my son is back,” said Jesus Rodriguez, the boy’s father. “I’ve gone nine days without much sleep.”

Rodriguez said he asked Andrew about his experience, but “he can’t express himself. He doesn’t speak much.” He said the boy could tell him nothing about Lopez, the man who brought him to authorities.

At Pico Boulevard and Mullen Avenue, where Lopez and many day laborers congregate waiting for work, friends talked recently about the brief celebrity the unemployed day laborer had earned from his heroics in finding Matthew.

Lopez and his friends told The Times two weeks ago that he was surprised by the amount of publicity he received from rescuing Matthew.

But they said Lopez felt a profound letdown when the television reporters stopped coming around and when promises of work failed to materialize. He was back where he had started--an unemployed man, living out of a friend’s truck, with no future to speak of.

“He thinks he did a good thing, but he also knows that presented with the occasion, any decent person would do the same,” said Andres Cabrales, a friend who volunteered to take calls from people who wanted to help Lopez.

“A big list of people have called, talking about jobs and money (and about) sending him things, but so far, no one has sent him anything,” said Cabrales, 35, who has been working as a day laborer for 13 years. “The promises never came true.”

Lopez in fact lost his steadiest employer, a contractor who would come by in a Range Rover and hire him to do interior decoration, because he was too busy talking to the media. The contractor found someone else.

Lopez has a bad wrist and cannot do much manual work, his friends said. After learning about his disability, several people who had promised Lopez employment backed out, Cabrales said.

Lopez was a street vendor in Mexico, and he was trying to get together enough money to start selling here, he said in the interview two weeks ago. He said he came to Los Angeles from Quintana Roo state, looking for a young Santa Monica woman he had met in Mexico. He said he never found her.

Lopez said that most nights he slept in a friend’s truck.

Police said that after Lopez found Matthew in December, some people called offering him money. Women came by the corner where he looked for work, offering food, and a church in Colorado called and asked him to move there.

Anaheim businessman Miguel Munoz, 46, who sent Lopez several hundred dollars, said Monday: “If a miracle can happen once, it can happen twice. And unfortunately, if a bad deed can happen once, it can happen twice. I’m going to wait until the evidence comes in to see what this is.”

After Lopez found Matthew, the child told relatives that a man he met at the bus station--a man he called “El Patito,” Spanish for the little duck--took him to the beach and to his house to watch television. El Patito also fed and bathed him and bought him clothes, Matthew said.

The boy had vanished just after he and his mother, Rosa Sanchez, arrived from Stockton to move in with his grandmother in Pacoima. When Matthew was asked what he did while he was missing, he told police that he had “walked and walked.”

Matthew said he fell asleep in a cab with El Patito and was inside a cab with the man when El Patito told him that he did not want him anymore and that he should go. Police said at the time that El Patito could have been a product of the boy’s imagination.

No connection has been made between the man Matthew called El Patito and Lopez.

Andrew Rodriguez, whose family had come to Los Angeles for a monthlong holiday visit with relatives, disappeared from his father’s side at a video arcade in the 700 block of South Broadway as his father played a game with the boy’s older brother.

Rodriguez, a cook at a Palm Desert restaurant, his wife, Esther, and their two boys had gone to the popular shopping district after opening Christmas presents.

Friends and relatives blanketed the area near the arcade with flyers describing Andrew. An anonymous businessman put up a $25,000 reward for his return, and police confirmed that Andrew had been spotted at the Greyhound bus station, a few blocks from the arcade.

At the home just south of Downtown where the Rodriguezes were staying with relatives, friends and neighbors gathered Monday afternoon to toast Andrew’s return with champagne.

“It’s a miracle,” one woman repeated over and over in Spanish.

“Now we can say, ‘Happy New Year,’ ” said Albert Suarez of Azusa, Rodriguez’s brother-in-law.