Family, Neighbors Join Search for Infant : Kidnaping: Flyers are distributed in an attempt to track down the suspect in the abduction of a 4-month-old Santa Ana girl.

The residents of South Poplar Street became one big family Monday evening as friends, relatives and strangers clustered around police to get handfuls of flyers and then canvassed neighborhoods seeking a woman believed to have kidnaped an infant.

“Why would this lady want to steal this little kid and make another mother’s life miserable?” asked Memo Ramirez, 18, who did not know Stefanny Zamora, the 4-month-old who disappeared from Sears in South Coast Plaza on Saturday. “It’s sad it happened. Passing out the flyers is going to help the little kid’s mom.”

The South Poplar neighbors were joined by police officers and Explorer cadets in distributing 2,000 bilingual flyers throughout areas of Santa Ana, Costa Mesa and Tustin, especially in the Latino community, police said.

“We’re going to target most of the Hispanic areas . . . she’s probably going to go some place she’s comfortable with,” Costa Mesa Police Sgt. Tom Boylan said.

Boylan told the volunteers to hit all the local Latino businesses and “any place where the lady might go to buy diapers, buy food, or do anything people do.”

The infant and her 17-year-old aunt, Esther Zamora, had gone with a woman the family barely knew to Sears on Saturday to have the baby’s photos taken. Esther Zamora said Monday that the woman told her to go call the baby’s mother to ask if she could buy a $10 photo frame.

Esther Zamora said she could not reach her sister-in-law or her brother and when she returned, the woman and baby were gone.

“I never expected that the lady would do this,” Esther Zamora said.

Mario Zamora, the baby’s father, said he has never met the suspect, Rosemary (Rosie) Marquez, but he is hopeful she is still in the area because the family has been fielding calls from people who think they have seen her.

“We’re going to (post flyers) near Target . . . where this lady that went to the Costa Mesa police said she saw (the kidnaper) Sunday around three o’clock,” Mario Zamora said.

Newport Beach attorney Christine Karol Roberts is assisting the family for free. She said she contacted the FBI and the agency is “fully involved with the case.”

James M. Donckels, a spokesman for the FBI in Santa Ana, would not say whether the FBI is investigating. But he said that in kidnapings in which neither parent is involved, police agencies usually request help from the FBI, which then takes a lead role.

The Zamoras have not gone to work since their daughter disappeared. She is a part-time hairdresser and he works at a manufacturing plant in Westminster.

The family and scores of neighbors have gathered at the home of a Zamora sister on South Poplar Street because the Zamoras do not have a telephone.