http://www.azcentral.com
Mystery surrounds girl, missing mother in N.Y.
Fernanda Santos
New York Times
Oct. 1, 2005 12:00 AM
NEW YORK - Her name is Valery Belen Saavedra Lozada and she has eyes as dark as black pearls. She is 4 years old, has a cat named Gary and knows to brush her teeth in the morning. She speaks English and Spanish, loves pizza, hates pickles and says she doesn't know why the man whom she calls her father woke her up one night last week, drove her to a dark street and left her there, alone and with no shoes on her feet.
She was found on a tidy block in Queens in the 1 a.m. coolness last Sunday by several people drawn by her cries. Kevin Flood, a firefighter, rushed to the phone and called 911. Branko Petrovic stood on the sidewalk, stumped. Georgina Visacki wrapped Valery in a blanket and took the girl in her arms.
Four days later, with no one coming forward to claim the little girl, the city's Administration for Children Services took an extraordinary step: It made her available to the cameras, hoping that her beautiful face and sweet demeanor would spur someone out there, in a city of 8 million residents, to come forward with a clue. One television station let the tape of the girl run for minutes, an eternity on the evening news. advertisement
The tactic worked. More than 100 calls came in Friday, leading the police to a break in the case - though not the one they had been hoping for. Investigators picked up the trail of a man who had been dating Valery's mother, and soon after they approached him they declared the mother missing. The little girl was too well cared for to have been abandoned, investigators said, so they were forced to face the darkest resolution for this mystery, that Valery's mother is dead.
Putting the girl on television jump-started the case. The child welfare agency's director of communications, Sharman Stein, said the decision to let Valery talk was based on a sense of urgency - and the feeling that Valery would be her own best advertisement.
"She was obviously a kid that was cared for, but no one had come forward, not a mother, not an aunt, not a grandmother," Stein said. "Three days passed, and that is a long time in the life of a kid. So I wanted to get her face out to as many people as possible."
Valery said her mother "looks like a princess," works where "people sit down and eat the food," and had something wrong with her face.
A dozen tips led police to the man Valery calls father, Cesar Ascarrunz. Investigators picked him up late on Thursday at his apartment. He was reluctant to talk at first, but eventually he began to share with authorities some information about Valery and her mother, Monica Rivadinera Lozada, a police spokesman said. The spokesman called Ascarrunz "a person of interest" but said Friday night that he was not under arrest.
Police said that based on what they were told, Ascarrunz, after rousing her from sleep and putting her in the car without shoes, stopped at the corner of 76th Street and Penelope Avenue and asked Valery to knock on a door.
