11-Year-Old May Be in Mexico

Investigators looking for an 11-year-old girl apparently abducted by a 21-year-old man in Laguna Hills said Tuesday they fear the two fled to Mexico.

Guadalupe Hernandez Vasquez and Asael Perez Celis, a San Clemente construction worker, were last seen about 11 a.m. Monday in San Ysidro when a friend of the 21-year-old’s dropped them off before returning the getaway Toyota Tercel to Perez’s employer in San Juan Capistrano.

“They probably crossed the border on foot before [the Border Patrol] got the pictures of them” circulated by investigators, said Jim Amormino, spokesman for the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.

Perez picked up Hernandez on her way to Lomarena Elementary School in Laguna Hills. The girl apparently went willingly, but authorities are treating the incident as an abduction because of the girl’s age, Amormino said.

Perez befriended the girl about a year ago, but her parents had recently become concerned over the attention he was paying to her and had told him to leave the family alone, authorities said.

With no new leads on her daughter’s whereabouts and no phone calls from her, Maria Vasquez said Tuesday she was becoming desperate. Vasquez and her 9-year-old daughter, Ana Rosa, had spent the night crying and praying for Guadalupe to appear at their front door.

“I just want her to come home,” Vasquez said. “I don’t know what to do. We don’t have family here. The police said they will find her.”

Sheriff’s investigators obtained information about Perez’s family in Mexico from a brother who also lives in Laguna Hills, Vasquez said. Vasquez and detectives called the relatives in Mexico to warn them Perez may arrive with a young girl. Local investigators are working with Mexican federal police forces to find Guadalupe, she said. Most of Perez’s family lives in Oaxaca, Mexico; the girl’s father lives in Jalisco.