Uncle to the Rescue : Crime: Newly arrived Peruvian man, already victimized by U.S. thieves, chases a suspected abductor who releases his young niece.

On the day Hernan Salazar arrived here from Peru to visit his sister, thieves stole his luggage from her car. Then, not long into his visit, a man tried to kidnap his 7-year-old niece. This time, Salazar fought back.

Salazar, 30, was trying to deal with the loss of his luggage when a man slipped into his sister’s apartment and lifted Fabiola Lopez from her bed, police said.

The man got in through an apparently unlocked sliding door and walked out with Fabiola flopped over his shoulder, awakening other family members. They ran out of the apartment screaming for her.

Salazar said he spotted the man outside, and shouted in Spanish for him to let go of the girl. The abductor dropped her and fled, he said.

Salazar, a former police officer in Peru, alerted a Tustin police officer who was giving a driver a ticket, and police soon swarmed the area. A police dog followed a scent to some bushes, where Pablo Vasquez Bojorquez, 35, was hiding, police said.

Bojorquez, a Tustin ice cream vendor who lives across the street from the family, was being held on suspicion of kidnaping and burglary Thursday.

Tustin police Sgt. Mike Pettifer said Bojorquez told investigators he ran into the Lopez apartment for refuge when two men tried to rob him. When he saw Fabiola in bed--in the arms of her sleeping grandmother--he figured that the robbers would not attack him on the street if he had a little girl with him, Bojorquez reportedly told police.

“That’s a new one to us,” Pettifer said of Bojorquez’s explanation.

Salazar, 30, said he was thankful his niece was not hurt. But “things have not gone well for us here,” Salazar said. “I’m going back to Peru as soon as possible.”

He plans to stay as long as police need him to resolve the kidnaping case.

Fabiola’s mother, Berta Lopez, was still shaken Thursday

“What intentions did the kidnaper have when he grabbed her?” she said. “Did he want to violate her? Kill her? I don’t even want to think about it.”

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Lopez, 33, a homemaker and baby-sitter, said her world would have been ruined if her only child had vanished.

“I came here from Peru five years ago to try to make a better life for my daughter,” she said. “Finally, a year and a half ago, I was able to go back to get Fabiola and bring her here.”

On Tuesday night, her family had had a reunion, eaten a Peruvian dinner of rice and chicken and talked late into the night.

About half an hour after Fabiola and her grandmother went to sleep in a bed set up in the living room, the grandmother felt someone take her.

At first she thought Fabiola’s father, Luis Lopez, had gotten her out of bed to take her to the bathroom.

“I yelled to my daughter, ‘Is Luis there with you?’ ” Eloina Salazar, 59, said. “When she said yes, I yelled that someone took the child.”

Fabiola’s mother said that “in the moment the man took her and I ran out of the apartment screaming her name, I thought of Polly Klaas,” she said. Klaas, a 12-year-old from Petaluma, Calif., was abducted from her bedroom last year and strangled.

Hernan Salazar also sped out to the street in his undershorts, yelling “Security! Policia !”

“If I had stopped to put on pants, who knows how far he could have gone,” he said.

When Hernan Salazar found the alleged kidnaper on the street, he ordered him to drop Fabiola. He ran after the man after he dropped her, but gave up the chase when he saw another man, who he thought might be an accomplice, get out of a nearby car.

Finding an officer who spoke Spanish was lucky, Salazar said.

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“If he didn’t understand Spanish, he probably would have thought I was crazy,” he said.

Tustin police officers found a pair of sandals the alleged kidnaper kicked off during the chase, and waved them under the nose of Artur, a German shepherd, who followed it to the shrubs.

Lopez said she plans to move out of Tustin to an apartment building with secured entrances.

On Thursday, Fabiola, known as “Fabby,” danced around her apartment in a summer dress and looked forward to going swimming. She was pleased that her mother had promised to buy a VCR and videos so she could watch her favorite movies.

All Fabiola remembered from the abduction, she said, was that a man picked her up and walked outside with her.

“I thought it was my uncle Hernan,” Fabiola said. “Nothing like this has ever happened to me before.”

If convicted, Bojorquez could face more than nine years in state prison, deputy public defender Robert A. Knox said. He remains in custody on $50,000 bail. Police said there apparently was no accomplice.

“I think the uncle did the right thing,” Pettifer said. “He confronted the guy verbally enough to get the girl back, but not enough to cause harm to him or to the girl. He’s more or less a hero.”

Times staff writers Anna Cekola and Greg Hernandez contributed to this story.