After Crash Ordeal, How Good a Search?

The call came in to the CHP dispatch center at 8:38 a.m. on April 4.

A motorist using a cellphone reported that a green Saturn hit the center divider of Highway 60 near Moreno Valley, careening across lanes before plunging into a ravine.

Three minutes later, the Riverside County Fire Department dispatched two trucks that drove both sides of the freeway but found nothing. A California Highway Patrol officer soon joined the search, stopping briefly to look over the side of the road. Both searches lasted less than 15 minutes.

In a ravine hidden from view 150 feet below the roaring traffic, Norma Bustamante lay dying, her 5-year-old daughter, Ruby, nestled close by. The little girl would survive nine days on her own, living off sports drinks and dried soup. Ruby would often snuggle in the crook of her dead mother’s arm.

In the two weeks since Ruby was found, her family has raised questions about whether authorities did enough in their search for the girl and mother, both from Indio.

Internal reviews by the Highway Patrol and the county Fire Department are continuing. Officials defend the way they responded but said they felt terrible that they could not find the car sooner. They said the car was obscured by trees, making it impossible to see from the freeway.

“We’ve gone over and over this incident, [asking] is there anything more we could have done,” said Mark Miller, a commander with the Indio Police Department, which also helped handle the case. “This was a terrible tragedy.”

Ruby’s family, however, is not convinced.

“This is an outrage,” said Ruby’s aunt Rose Lopez. “Someone needs to be held accountable for this. There’s no excuse for this young mother being left out there to die.”

Norma Bustamante’s aunt, Judy Cortina, said she couldn’t understand why the search for the car lasted less than 15 minutes when authorities spend days searching for missing hikers and snowboarders.

“When you have a lost hiker, everybody’s up there looking,” Cortina said. “What’s the difference between a missing mom and her child, and a hiker? ... They didn’t do a darned thing. You have a little 5-year-old watching her mom, laying there.”

The last time Bustamante talked to her family was about 8:30 that morning when she received a call on her cellphone from her sister Melissa Garcia. Garcia said the conversation lasted only a few minutes before the call was cut off.

“I’ll call you back,” Bustamante told Garcia just as the phone went dead.

Mother and daughter were en route to visit the mother’s boyfriend, Eddie Garcia, at a Los Angeles County jail in Norwalk. She was supposed to be back by 5 that afternoon, at the latest. The boyfriend called Bustamante’s sister later that afternoon to tell her that Bustamante had never made it to the jail.

“That’s when we got worried,” said Bustamante’s aunt Judy Cortina. “We called everyone, and nobody had heard from her. It wasn’t like her. We knew she wouldn’t have run off.”

They tried her cellphone but could not get through. By noon the next day, the family knew something was seriously wrong.

“We were thinking the worst,” Cortina said. “We were just worried she got into an accident. Maybe she was stranded somewhere -- carjacked, kidnapped.”

An Indio police sergeant came to Norma Bustamante’s mother’s home and took a missing-person report, Cortina said. Relatives were told that an Amber Alert would not go out because Bustamante was an adult. Authorities would check to see whether any accidents had been reported in the area, the sergeant told them. At one point, one officer suggested that perhaps Bustamante, a mother of six, was “stressed out” and had just gotten away for a few days, Cortina said.

“We kept saying it’s not like her to take off,” she recalled.

Family members said they begged police to do more, checking with them daily and visiting a CHP office to see whether there had been any accidents along the roads Bustamante might have been driving that Sunday. The family made and posted their own fliers and persuaded a local television station to run a short report.

The family found out about the initial report of an accident only after Ruby was rescued. “Somebody called the same day,” Cortina said. “Why are telling us that there was no accident?”

CHP officials responded that no accident report was taken because neither their officer nor the fire officials could find any sign of one.

Indio police said they did all they could to find the pair, including checking with hospitals and issuing a bulletin that went to all law enforcement agencies, including the CHP.

Riverside County Fire Department investigators released a report last week saying they had followed normal procedures for responding to a reported accident. They had two firetrucks, each driving 40 to 45 mph, cover 10 miles of the freeway.

“This has been a long-standing, successful practice,” the report said.

Because Highway 60 has little or no shoulder room and blind curves, and heavy, fast-moving traffic, the highway “presents significant dangers to emergency responders,” the report said. The CHP would have had to close the freeway for a wide-area search to be done safely, according to the report.

The CHP is still examining its response to the crash report as well as what caused the car to go off the road. But officials maintain that the odds of them finding the mother and daughter, no matter how much they looked, were slim.

The initial call from the witness was not precise about where the car went over the side, they said. The ravine where the car came to rest was almost impossible to see from the road.

The car was discovered by a road maintenance crew performing routine repairs. The crew noticed something moving under a canopy of trees in the ravine. The movement turned out to be Ruby venturing outside the car.

“This was like trying to find a needle in a haystack,” said Miller of the Indio police. Officer Chris Blondon, a spokesman with the San Gorgonio Pass CHP office, said he didn’t think official policy changes needed to be made.

“Officers across the board are going to be thinking hard; they are obviously going to be going that extra mile each time,” he said. “They’re just going to be more conscious of it.”

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Times staff writer Seema Mehta contributed to this report.

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Search timeline

The California Highway Patrol and Riverside County Fire Department spent less than 15 minutes investigating a report of a car driving off Highway 60 and into a ravine on April 4. Here’s a breakdown:

8:38 a.m.: CHP dispatch received 911 call from motorist who reported a car going off the 60 Freeway and into a ravine.

8:39: CHP dispatch contacted Riverside County Fire Department and advised of report of accident.

8:41: Fire Department dispatched two fire engines, one headed east, one headed west, and contacted AMR ambulance company to respond to a traffic collision.

8:44: CHP officer was advised to drive toward the scene and help in the search.

8:51: One fire engine reported it was in the area, unable to locate accident, and requested further information.

8:52: The other fire engine reported it was unable to locate the accident. Continued driving search.

8:54: Fire engines discontinued search.

8:55: Fire dispatcher canceled ambulance response.

8:56: Fire Department told CHP it was unable to locate the reported accident. CHP officer began his search anyway.

9:04: CHP officer radioed that he was also unable to locate the accident.

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Sources: CHP, Riverside County Fire Department

Los Angeles Times