Family’s Agony Lingers

Two years after the disappearance of Sandra Nevarez from a Sylmar coin-operated laundry, the discovery of unidentified remains in the area has pitted relatives’ hope for her survival against their desperate need for closure in the case.

An answer may not come for months, say police, who have asked family members for blood samples to help determine through genetic testing if the bones are those of the 41-year-old mother of four.

The recent development has also widened a rift between Nevarez’s relatives and her husband, Pete, a truck driver for 20th Century Fox studios in West Los Angeles who was questioned by Los Angeles Police Department detectives early in the case but never charged.

“I tried to make amends. I tried to talk to them. But eventually I said, ‘You guys go your own way and I’ll go mine,’ ” Nevarez said Friday, after spending the anniversary of his wife’s disappearance posting fliers near the laundry.

Sandra Nevarez--described as devoted to her family--became one of 185 unsolved abduction cases for the LAPD on Jan. 17, 1995, after her car was discovered in a rear parking lot of the laundry, situated between a drugstore and smaller establishments of a strip mall.

The rear lot is often used by regular patrons such as Nevarez because spaces are plentiful and close to an open back door.

Nevarez, who had dropped off her youngest child, Joseph, at school just two hours before, was seen at the laundry around 10 a.m. At 4 p.m., the dependable Nevarez failed to pick Joseph up.

Later that evening, Joseph, now 18, and the couple’s oldest child Anthony, now 25, searched for their mother at the laundry. The brothers discovered the neatly folded laundry inside the trunk of their mother’s car, a small pool of blood on the ground under the rear bumper and her purse nearby with its contents still inside.

In the days and months that followed, relatives and friends posted fliers throughout the area. Many news reports appeared, then faded.

The family organized about 50 people to canvass dozens of abandoned buildings because Nevarez’s brother, David Rodriguez, had a vivid dream that his sister was tied up in an empty room.

“A day doesn’t go by that I don’t think of Sandra,” Rodriguez said last week. “I thought I saw her the other day, driving down the street.”

The area’s City Council member, Richard Alarcon, helped approve a $25,000 reward that loosened no tongues before it expired. A Glendale private investigator charged $1,000 for his initial work, and since has done $4,000 worth of labor free of charge because he grew close to the family and was obsessed by the case.

A group of psychics even searched Lopez Canyon pro bono after they said their senses drew them to that site on a map.

The police questioning of Pete Nevarez led some relatives to suspect he had a connection to the disappearance and others to defend him.

LAPD Det. Patti Ferguson, who first handled the Nevarez case, said spouses often become suspects in missing persons cases but that investigators never found a financial gain or jealousy motive for Pete Nevarez.

“We are in contact with him and he calls us at least once a week trying to find out if there has been any progress,” Ferguson said. “But until we know what happened to her, no one is considered innocent.”

Reached at his Sylmar home, Pete Nevarez said he has given up on appeals to suspicious in-laws and is eager to resolve the mystery that has tormented the family. The couple’s grown children now live on their own.

Nevarez’s siblings echoed similar hopes at the nearby home of sister Christine Alvidrez. Of the skeletal remains found in November on a service road between the laundry and the Foothill Freeway, Alvidrez said, “I think she wants to come home and is waiting to come home and it’s up to us to find her.”

But shortly after, Alvidrez reluctantly nodded in agreement when her older brother, Rodriguez, said, “There’s got to be an end. We have to accept the hand God dealt.”