O.C. Student’s Disappearance Baffles Family, Friends, Police

The disappearance of Cathy Torrez doesn’t make sense to anyone. Not to her family, the police, her teachers, her friends or her bosses.

Young people run away all the time, they say, but not those like Torrez.

An honor student at Cal State Fullerton who also holds two jobs, the 20-year-old Torrez calls her mother if she’s going out after work. She has never been in trouble, used drugs or barhopped, they say. There are no angry ex-boyfriends.

So why did Torrez disappear a week ago during her one-mile drive home from work? There is no evidence that she ran away or was abducted. She and her burgundy Toyota Corolla, license plate 2RMC785, simply vanished.

“The Earth couldn’t have just opened up and swallowed her,” her mother, Mary Bennett, said Friday. Torrez lives with her mother, stepfather, a brother and one of her two sisters.

Relatives and friends took calls from well-wishers Friday and distributed thousands of flyers to volunteers who are papering north Orange County. A week-old letter from a Cal State Fullerton dean congratulating Torrez on making last semester’s honor roll sits on a table.

“Anybody who knows her knows she wouldn’t just go away,” Bennett said. “Something had to have happened to her, but we don’t know what.”

The case has Placentia police baffled. Her bank accounts haven’t been touched, even though she only had $30 and no credit cards with her.

“We have followed leads, but there has been nothing to indicate foul play,” Placentia police Detective Donna Rose said. “But she is not the type of 20-year-old who would just leave, and that has us concerned.”

Police and family say that about 7:50 p.m. Feb. 12, Torrez called her mother from the Sav-On Drugs store at Bradford Avenue and Yorba Linda Boulevard, where she has worked for almost four years as a checker, and indicated she would be home shortly.

At 8 p.m., the 4-foot-10 Torrez walked out of Sav-On to her car with a female co-worker, said “see you in the morning,” and drove out of the lot, heading south on Bradford. Then she disappeared.

If she was going home, she would taken Bradford for one mile, passing several homes and apartments, Valencia High School--her alma mater and other employer--and St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, where she would have slowed and blessed herself with the sign of the cross, her mother said. She would have stopped at one stop sign.

At Chapman Avenue, she would have stopped at a light, turned west and driven one block to her home. The trip should have taken five minutes at the longest.

“We have been back and forth, over and under everything in her life and there is nothing that tells us she wouldn’t want to come home,” said Ron Bennett, her stepfather. “It’s confusing.”

Torrez’s mother sat patiently through one television interview after another in her living room Friday night, trying to get the word out about her daughter’s disappearance.

Later, at the kitchen table, she said she sometimes thinks she hears her daughter at night tapping on her bedroom window. Debbie, Torrez’s 13-year-old sister, awakens sometimes thinking Torrez is whispering to her.

During the day, Bennett calls everyone who knows her daughter, trying to find a clue.

“Unless somebody is lying, no one has heard from her,” she said.

Tina Lopez, Torrez’s 22-year-old sister, keeps a log of everyone who has been contacted. She’s convinced her sister wouldn’t go anyplace alone.

“She couldn’t go anywhere or do anything alone by herself,” Lopez said, “not even the store. She would try to get somebody to go and if they couldn’t, she wouldn’t go. She couldn’t even eat alone. She would make one of us come and sit with her.”

Sav-On co-worker Lisa Ripley said that “except when she drove to work, I never saw her alone.”

In front of Sav-On on Friday, Martin Torrez, her 19-year-old brother, was passing out flyers--as he has every day since her disappearance--hoping to find a witness.

“A lot of people say they know her,” he said as he handed a flyer to another Sav-On customer. “They all tell me how nice she is.”

At Valencia High, where Torrez worked as a teacher’s aide last semester, teacher Clara Rodriguez-Creger said she “is not the flighty type who would just take off. She cares too much about her family to leave without even a phone call. She is very responsible, and that is what is frightening to anyone who knows her.”

Mary Bennett says she just wants to know what happened, even if it turns out to be bad news.

“We have to know,” Bennett said. “We will never be able to get on with our lives until we find out.”