Missing Contra Costa girl, 11, turns up safe, sound

0 Comments | Oakland Tribune, Jan 3, 2007 | by Tom LochnerSTAFF

An 11-year-old Montalvin Manor girl missing since Friday has been found safe in Oakland together with an adult cousin who called for her at a friend's house that day, Contra Costa County sheriff's spokesman Jimmy Lee said.

The Montalvin Elementary School sixth-grader was at a classmate's house when she received a phone call, apparently from her cousin, the classmate's mother, Marta Gomez, said.

"She was doing her homework here," Gomez said. "She said, 'I'll be back in two minutes.'"

The girl went to the door, and that was the last Gomez heard of her -- until Tuesday.

Lee said Oakland police found the two shortly after midday Tuesday. Harpreet Sandhu, a leader of West Contra Costa's Sikh community to which the girl and her cousin belong, said the pair was met Tuesday by family members at the cousin's workplace, an Oakland copy center, where he had gone because he ran out of money.

The cousin, a 20-year-old man, often came by to pick up the girl as well as her two younger sisters, Gomez said. The three sisters sometimes came to Gomez's house to play, do homework and use her daughter's computer, Gomez said.

The young man's father and the girl's father are brothers, Sandhu said. Both families live a short distance from Gomez's house in Montalvin Manor, an unincorporated area north of San Pablo. Neither family had heard from either the girl or the young man since Friday, Lee and Gomez said.

The two families, as well as Gomez, feared the pair may have met an unhappy fate. Sandhu contacted missing children organizations and acted as liaison between the sheriff's office and the two families.

Sandhu said it turned out Tuesday that the pair spent most of the last four days at a strip mall off Richmond Parkway.

"It was a silly, stupid thing," Sandhu said. "They went out too late, and they just got scared. That's what happened.

"It was five days of excursion for them, hell for their parents."

Lee said "our detectives feel there is no further need" to pursue the case, which his agency treated as a missing juvenile case, "given that she voluntarily went with him" even though she is only 11.

"It's not a stranger either," Lee said. "It was a cousin."

Nevertheless, Lee said, "We're looking to talk to him and find out a little bit more."