Slain Teen Big on Books and Plans

She was a teenager who left Argentina with her family a year ago, after that country’s robust economy collapsed, leaving them without a means of support.

After arriving in the United States, Ornella Maccari, 18, derived pleasure from the things that sustained and defined her back home. She consumed books, and collected seashells from the beach and bird feathers from the street.

She liked alternative rock music and dreamed of being a nature photographer. She took night classes to learn English and worked in the kitchen of the Burger King blocks from the Downey apartment she shared with her stepfather and mother.

Her parents last heard from Maccari about 11:30 p.m. Thursday when she called to say she would walk home from work.

“I told her mom, ‘Tell her I’ll go pick her up,’ ” said her stepfather, Gabriel Ramallo. “She said ‘No, no, I’ll walk.’ She said something about the moon being lovely that night and I don’t know what else.”

On Friday morning, her body was found in a secluded dirt lot near the Orange Freeway north of Brea. Police found Maccari’s body after tracking her cell phone signal. Coroner’s officials conducted an autopsy Saturday, but the cause of death was not released, said Orange County Sheriff’s Lt. Larry Abbott.

The family’s apartment is filled with books she had read by Franz Kafka, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Juan Salvador Gaviota and Federico Garcia Lorca. Maccari missed the pet Dalmatian, Jimmy, that she had to leave in her hometown of Cordoba, a provincial capital in central Argentina and that country’s second-largest city.

“When she wasn’t working, she was reading,” said a friend, Alfredo Decima, 27. She used bird feathers -- from crows to pigeons -- as bookmarks.

She collected SpongeBob SquarePants figures, her stepfather said, and “she bought a camera three days ago and she never even got to use it.”

Anyone with information is asked to call the Orange County Sheriff’s Department at (714) 628-7170.