Fear Mounts Over Fate of Missing Activist

Friends of Kathy Silveri say they still can’t believe the well-known community activist has been missing for more than two weeks, insisting that her mysterious disappearance on Jan. 12 goes against her very nature.

“Everyone said you could set your clock by Kathy,” said Gerard Kapuscik, general manager of the Channel Islands Beach Community Service District, of which Silveri was once a board member. “She was meticulous and detailed. That’s what shocks and concerns us so much.”

By now, many people in the community know the story: Silveri, 43, went to work as usual on Friday, Jan. 12. She was overheard by one colleague setting a tentative meeting with someone for later that night. She left at 6 p.m. as she usually did and biked to her home in the Silver Strand Beach area near Oxnard. She came out to say hello to some neighbors, and went back inside. That was the last anyone saw of her.

Some might say that Silveri was fastidious. She was the sort of woman to whom small details mattered. She punched in and out of work on the dot and never missed a day even when she was sick, remembers Loretta Arevalo, the office manager at Las Islas Family Medical Center in Oxnard, where Silveri worked as an X-ray technician.

The following Monday was Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a floating holiday for employees of the medical center. “Some of us thought she just got confused and took the day off,” Arevalo said. But when Tuesday came and Silveri didn’t show up to work, colleagues became worried. Co-workers called her emergency contact, her husband Gene Ball.

Ball, 50, and Silveri did not live together, although they have been married for 20 years. The two have an unofficial and amicable separation, but had kept in touch regularly, he said.

“She’d often go down [to Los Angeles] and visit her sister,” he said, so he wasn’t concerned when he couldn’t reach her by phone over the weekend. That was until Silveri’s colleagues at work called him that Tuesday to say she had not shown up for two days.

He accompanied them to the modest, blue bungalow she rented at 333 Laurel Court to see what they could find. Apart from a very hungry cat, everything was in place: her bike, her helmet, her running shoes.

Silveri was a familiar fixture in the Silver Strand Beach area. She was regularly seen by people jogging or biking down the neighborhood’s streets. She was a community activist, particularly concerned with environmental issues.

She helped organize the Channel Islands Beach Community Service District, a governing agency for the unincorporated county area, and served on its board from 1985 to 1988. When the Navy wanted to test jet fighters a mile offshore from Silver Strand homes, she and others mobilized to form a citizens group--The Beacon--to fight the plan. She was an avid writer of letters to the editorial sections of local newspapers.

In the days before her disappearance, Silveri mentioned going sailing with someone. Investigators don’t know if that person was male or female, but there are no reports of missing boats from any harbors in the area, said Lt. Larry Robertson of the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department’s major crime unit.

“We’re sad to say that there isn’t a lot of anything to update,” said Robertson. “She literally walked off the face of the Earth.”

In California, from Jan. 1 through Nov. 30, 1995, the most recent figures available, 157,233 people were reported missing, said Jeannine Willie, a supervisor at the Department of Justice’s missing/unidentified persons unit in Sacramento.

Some 3,726 adults and juveniles were reported missing in Ventura County during the same period. The majority were juveniles, mostly runaways, and most were eventually found alive.

Authorities are still searching for 221 juveniles and 49 adults reported missing during those 11 months. Silveri’s case, logged this year, has not yet been added to the statistics.

For now, nobody knows quite what to think. Police have no suspects. Silveri’s smiling face is still plastered throughout the community on a missing-person leaflet that friends and police have posted. Friends held a candlelight vigil in front of her house Friday night. Ball said he is keeping the place up, just the way she left it, for when she comes back.

“But it’s getting hard to be upbeat about this,” Ball said. “So much time has passed.” In the meantime, Silveri’s tabby cat pokes its head out expectantly through the window blinds at passersby, just to be sure.