Boy’s Kidnapping Unifies Small Town

In this small town of wilted shops and modest homes, no one is saying the word “or.”

Hundreds of determinedly cheerful volunteers are pinning yellow ribbons, faxing fliers and tacking “Missing Child” posters on every window in sight. They will keep doing it, they vow, until 10-year-old Anthony Martinez--abducted last week from outside his home--is returned to his mother safe and sound.

Residents will not speak of any other possible outcome to this crisis. They do not say they will continue to work until Tony comes home or the search is abandoned. They do not say they will continue to pray until Tony comes home or the worst happens.

No, they flat-out insist that Tony will come home. He will return to this friendly farm town to play with his cat and tease his baby sister and shoot hoops with his classmates at recess. Absolutely, positively, no “or” about it.

Until then, Beaumont will keep fighting for him with all the spirit a small town can muster.

Determined not to let a kidnapper bully them into big-city detachment, Beaumont residents have been volunteering with a vengeance. As local travel agent RoxyAnn Reichel put it, while rushing to fax posters to all of her business contacts: “This is a giving kind of town.”

Volunteers cooked lunch and dinner Tuesday for all the out-of-town police officers working the case. They also slipped posters of Tony into 2,000 cheery helium balloons, which his fourth-grade classmates released from a park to spread his pictures wherever the winds might take them. They are planning a country music concert as a fund-raiser for further search efforts. And from their “Help Bring Tony Home” headquarters--a cluttered room in City Hall--they are monitoring a hotline, organizing a child safety conference and persuading the local casino to run a missing-boy alert on its billboard.

The City Council even passed a resolution urging residents to leave their porch lights on at night until Tony returns, “as a symbol to help light his way home.”

“This is the type of community that really comes together in time of crisis,” Mayor Jan Leja said proudly.

The crisis began April 4 when a slim stranger--a white man with blue eyes and a mustache--approached Tony, his younger brother and two friends as they played in an alley outside their homes. The man asked the children to help him find his lost cat, holding out a dollar as enticement. Sensing trouble, Tony’s two friends ran inside their nearby house. But the stranger grabbed Tony as his 6-year-old brother watched. The man pulled a knife from his waistband and forced the fourth-grader into his truck, according to Beaumont Police Lt. John Acosta.

“His mother called us on 911 saying she had heard [her younger son] screaming: ‘Hey, they took Tony! They took Tony!’ ” Acosta said.

Using bloodhounds who sniffed the scent lifted from Tony’s desk and books at school, investigators have tracked the boy through the back roads of Beaumont and west on Interstate 10 out toward San Mateo Canyon, a desolate wilderness area that police have been searching on horseback and by helicopter. Beaumont police have also checked on more than a dozen registered sex offenders in the area and have pursued scores of other tips phoned in to a toll-free hotline. They have ruled out family involvement, Acosta said, but so far have no other firm leads.

FBI agents have joined the hunt, along with investigators from the Los Angeles Police Department, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and a host of other agencies, including some veterans of the search for Polly Klaas in Northern California.

With this crack team at work--and the enormous volunteer effort backing them up--Tony’s parents remain optimistic, according to his grandmother, Yvonne Burkins. “They’re holding on,” she said. “They’ve got all the hope in the world.”

So do the volunteers of Beaumont.

Still, the abduction has them frightened.

A city of 10,000 in Riverside County, Beaumont has its share of crime. Many of the downtown businesses have bars over the doors and windows, and police record two or three homicides a year. But residents have long considered it about as safe as a California city can get.

It’s the kind of town where a shop owner might feel just the slightest bit jittery about walking to her car with the moneybag at night--but it’s also the kind of town where police officers will willingly escort her if she calls to ask for help. It’s not perfect, residents say, but it is a great place to raise a family.

And it is a town that cares about its children--a lot.

The most prominent billboards in town warn that drunk driving can kill innocent children. A sign at the city limits cautions visitors: “Drive slowly. Protect our children.” And the police station lobby displays an award honoring the chief for his commitment to child safety.

So naturally, Tony’s fate has become a community project.

“You hear about this stuff happening up in L.A. and you just kind of channel surf past it, but when it happens here, that’s a whole different story,” said Duke Michaels, a Beaumont-bred country singer who will be holding a benefit concert with the Wolf Creek band April 19.

Sniffling back tears as she gathered posters and yellow ribbons to distribute while visiting Ontario, Kimberly Lamas, a mother of four, said she felt compelled to help the search effort any way she could. “I just can’t bear the thought of that little boy out there all by himself,” she said.

Lamas said her youngest son, 4-year-old Christian, was so scared by the kidnapping that he refuses to play with his friends unless his parents stand watch. Wearing black Batman shoes and a superhero shirt, Christian struck a bold pose, boasting that he couldn’t be captured by anyone. “Not me,” he said. “I’m a big boy.” But Lamas said her son sticks close to her and asks of every stranger they pass on the street: “Is he the bad man?”

To encourage all children to talk about their fears, Beaumont school officials have sent counselors and pastors into every classroom.

In response to a counseling session, one fifth-grade student wrote an earnest letter to Tony, wherever he may be, ordering him to break the rules if he has to in order to escape from his abductor and come home: “Find a way out,” she urged. “Just break a window, for all we care. Just find a way out of that stupid person’s house.”

The toll-free hotline number is: (888) 709-7997.