Kidnaped Girl Found; Family Friend Held

A 4-year-old Long Beach girl was found safe in an apartment Thursday evening, and a Santa Ana woman suspected of kidnaping her the day before was in custody.

Still wearing the same outfit as when she was abducted, little Karina Melendez was found about 6 p.m. at the apartment complex in the 3000 block of Leeward Avenue in Los Angeles by a police officer.

Police said someone called 911 to report that the girl and her kidnaper could be found at the location, but offered no further details.

“The caller was a citizen who had a hunch that someone they saw at the apartment complex matched the description put out by us and various media reports,” said Darren Lance, a Long Beach police services assistant.

Arrested in the abduction was Maria Sandra Garcia, 37, who had recently befriended the girl’s mother, Delia Bueno, and offered to watch Bueno’s four children Wednesday afternoon while Bueno walked to a pay phone and made a call.

Garcia was booked late Thursday into the Long Beach Jail on $50,000 bail while Karina was examined at an undisclosed hospital in Long Beach, authorities said.

Police said the girl would be reunited with her mother at the Long Beach police station after Bueno had been briefed by officers.

On Wednesday, when Bueno returned home from making her phone call, her three sons were there but her daughter was gone. On Thursday, the mother gave a direct plea to cameras for Spanish-language news broadcasts.

“If it’s you listening,” Bueno said, tears rolling down her eyes as she clutched her daughter’s pink-and-white stuffed rabbit, “please bring my child back to me. I won’t be mad at you. This is my daughter’s bunny. Please bring her home.”

Long Beach police had received hundreds of calls about the whereabouts of the girl before the 911 caller responded, Lance said.

The case has several haunting similarities to two other kidnapings since March--one in Santa Ana, the other in Pomona--although the three abductions are not related. The two children in the earlier cases turned up unharmed.

In all three, the suspects befriended a mother and allegedly kidnaped the children after offering to take care of them. In all three, the parents had more than one child and the suspects were women who were bereft of one of their own children.

In one case, the suspect had suffered a miscarriage, and in the second the suspect’s baby was stillborn. In this case, according to Bueno, the suspect had said she had a 2-year-old daughter that she had given away at the age of 5 months.

Bueno said she met Garcia in an evangelical Santa Ana church, Soldiers of the Cross of Christ, about three months ago. Both women had lived in apartments connected to the church, police said, and Garcia was still living there until the abduction.

“She never gave me any reason not to trust her,” Bueno said tearfully.

On Tuesday evening, Garcia showed up at Bueno’s home on East Broadway in Long Beach, along with her son and a 22-year-old male friend. Garcia said she had no place to stay that night, and Bueno invited her in.

The following day, when Bueno returned from a pay phone, her 7-year-old son told her that Garcia had left with Karina. Garcia’s friend, Francisco Torralvo, had left earlier in the day. Torralvo is now being held by Long Beach police, but has not been arrested or charged with any crime.

The manager of the apartment buildings run by the church in the 900 block of East Chestnut Street said that Garcia left her apartment Tuesday without asking permission, as residents of the units are supposed to do.

On Thursday, her apartment was strewn with clothes. A battered refrigerator was bare except for a gallon of milk.

In the Pomona kidnaping, police found 5-day-old Alexis Caballero unharmed at the Downey home of his alleged abductor two days after he was stolen in March. The woman charged in the case, Joann Santos, 35, had suffered a miscarriage when she was seven months pregnant, but didn’t tell her family.

After the abduction, Santos allegedly tried to pass off the child as her own. But her husband was suspicious and called police after seeing a news broadcast about the missing boy.

Santos allegedly stole the infant after dropping off the mother, Maria Magana, at an assistance center with her other three children and promising to bring the baby in soon. Instead, Santos took off, police said. Santos pleaded not guilty to one count of kidnaping; her trial is scheduled to begin Aug. 23.

In the Santa Ana case, 4-month-old Steffany Zamora was missing for a week in April after the suspect, Maria Luisa Martinez, offered to take the girl to a department store to have her photograph taken. Martinez, according to police, had convinced Beatriz Zamora, 24, that her infant daughter could be a model.

The girl was found in the farming town of Delano after a neighbor saw a picture of Steffany on a Spanish-language television program and notified police. Martinez told police she had lost her own baby at birth last November and wanted to replace her. Her trial on charges of kidnaping and vehicle theft is scheduled to start July 31.

Police believe that this week’s kidnaping is another case in which the suspect was hoping to replace a lost child with someone else’s.

“This child (Karina) wasn’t taken to be sexually abused or murdered, is our feeling,” said Long Beach detective Bill MacLyman. “She was taken because [Garcia] wanted a girl child. I feel, I hope, we will find her safe.”

Times correspondent Jeff Kass contributed to this story from Santa Ana.