Mother Seeks Answers, Solace After Slayings

With tears streaming down her face, Gloria De la Cruz stood before an Oxnard church congregation last week trying to make sense of her 18-year-old daughter’s slaying.

“I’m angry. I feel so alone. My baby . . .,” she said, sobbing.

A popular mariachi singer, De la Cruz’s daughter--also named Gloria--disappeared in late April from her El Rio home. Her body was found a day later in a trash receptacle in the Wilshire district of Los Angeles. It took authorities 17 days to identify her and notify her mother.

Last week De la Cruz, 56, was looking for shoulders to cry on, looking for people to hear her story.

She needed some solace, but a day after delivering her impassioned church testimony, De la Cruz was hit with another tragedy: Her 46-year-old brother was shot to death in front of a house in the Colonia neighborhood of Oxnard.

“What am I going to do?” De la Cruz said Thursday, a day after burying her brother. “This is more than a person can take. I can’t feel anything anymore.”

She wants justice. She wants the police to catch the killers. She said she wants some release from the pain she feels.

This afternoon, clergy from churches throughout Oxnard plan to hold a vigil at the De la Cruz home to pray that the violence that has brought these twin tragedies on her family will stop, said the Rev. Larry Tyler-Wayman.

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Tyler-Wayman has started an interfaith council, the Faith Connection, which is holding vigils for each victim of violence in the county.

“We want to end the cycle of violence,” Tyler-Wayman said.

The vigil will start at 4:30 p.m. at the De la Cruz home at 1123 Walnut Drive in El Rio.

Her double tragedy has been compounded, she says, by a lack of responsiveness from local law enforcement agencies. When her daughter disappeared, De la Cruz said, she went to the Oxnard Police Department and the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department for help. She felt they dragged their feet.

De la Cruz blames the delay in identifying her daughter, in part, on the failure of law enforcement officials to take down all the necessary information when she first reported her daughter missing.

“Seventeen days my daughter was just a Jane Doe in the morgue,” she said. “That’s not right. We shouldn’t have had to go through that. Nobody should.”

Local authorities said they did all they could.

“To tell you the truth, I’d probably feel the same way,” said Capt. Bruce Hansen of the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department. “I don’t know why it took so long to identify Mrs. De la Cruz’s daughter. Our detectives say part of the reason was her fingerprints weren’t in the system. The other reason is that she was found in L.A. where they have a lot of cases to deal with.”

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Because De la Cruz’s daughter was found in Los Angeles, the investigation of her death is being handled by homicide detectives there. De la Cruz worries that without help from local authorities, the crime won’t be solved.

“They don’t know the people here, they don’t know the streets,” she said. “We’re doing more investigating than they have. I’m not knocking them, but they have enough to work on already down there. With all that, how much time are they going to spend looking into leads up here?”

But Ventura County sheriff’s officials said there is little they can do about that.

“We have a detective assigned to help in any way needed, but there is no way we can push ourselves onto a Los Angeles investigation,” Hansen said. “We’re going to do everything humanly possible to help them, but I don’t think we can do more.”

On Aug. 16 De la Cruz’s brother, Manuel Ortiz Amaro, was shot several times in the torso and head in front of a house in the 1500 block of Morris Street.

Amaro was either coming from or going to a doctor’s appointment, said De la Cruz’s daughter, Corrina Arenas, 36. She said she fears that authorities will again drag their feet, letting leads get cold and making the slaying harder to solve.

“I just don’t want the same thing that happened with my sister to happen with my uncle,” Arenas said.

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The family has made it a point to badger the Oxnard Police Department and the Sheriff’s Department about the cases, trying to push them to do more. At Tuesday’s Oxnard City Council meeting, De la Cruz also appealed to city officials for action.

“We’re not letting this go,” she said.

Anyone with information on the slaying of Gloria De la Cruz is asked to call Los Angeles Police Det. Paul Inabu or Det. Bob Feliz at (213) 847-3999. Information on the death of Manuel Ortiz Amaro should be directed to the Oxnard Police Department.

The family is also offering a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the daughter’s killer. Family members have planned a November fund-raiser to bolster the reward effort.

Donations can also be made to a fund called “In memory of Gloria ‘Babash’ De la Cruz” at the Bank of America, 1855 N. Oxnard Blvd., 93030.

“We’re not going to let people forget my daughter,” De la Cruz said.