Widow Can’t Hide Child From Death

On Sunday night, the neighbors said, when the bedroom that 5-year-old Anna Cruz shared with her widowed mother was too hot for the child to go to sleep, she moved to the living room, where her brother slept on the fold-out sofa bed.

The Cruz family had lived in the two-story apartment building south of Whittier for only a few months, but everyone already knew how close to her side Emilia Cruz had kept her daughter.

Anna was the youngest of the four children the woman had brought from El Salvador about a year ago, neighbors said, after her cab driver husband was killed in one of those random shootings that always create more sorrow than sense in that unsettled country.

So Anna was never allowed to cavort by the pool or race through the parking lot with the other children--more than 100 of them live in the 36-unit building.

Watched Children

When little neighbor girls like Tamar Butler wanted to play Barbie dolls with Anna, they played in Anna’s apartment, where Anna’s mother, working at her sewing machine at her small seamstress business, could keep an eye on them.

Throughout the recent Night Stalker scare, the people in the building on Coteau Drive had kept their windows, fronting a walkway running around the inside of the building, firmly closed.

With the capture of a suspect in the series of slayings and assaults, the windows were flung open, and everyone breathed fresh air and relief.

But the windows of Apartment 26, the Cruz home, stayed closed, neighbors said.

At around 3:30 a.m. Monday, sheriff’s investigators said, Emilia Cruz heard noises in the front room and awoke to see a shadowy figure flee into the darkness. Her youngest daughter was lying on the kitchen floor. Investigators would not reveal how the apartment was entered. They believe the intruder took the girl to the kitchen without awakening her brother.

The mother’s screams of “They’re killing my daughter!” woke neighbors. Meanwhile, her eldest daughter, Silvia, 13, dialed the 911 emergency number, summoning sheriff’s deputies and paramedics, who found Anna dead. No one else in the apartment was injured.

Sheriff’s detectives are calling the death a murder in the course of a burglary. Nothing has turned up missing so far--”they didn’t really have anything,” a sheriff’s lieutenant said.

The burglar may have left more than he took: Neighbors found a pair of ordinary canvas shoes, which may belong to the intruder. And detectives found a knife, which may belong to the Cruz family.

Investigators believe that Anna may have been raped and strangled or suffocated. An autopsy was scheduled.

On Monday, the apartment building courtyard was abuzz. Doors stood open as neighbors and children commiserated and swapped news.

Apartment 26 was empty. The mother and children were with her sister.

Wide Open

Cathy Butler, 29, whose daughter sometimes played with Anna, fretted because her own windows had been wide open during the night and because, at 3 a.m. Monday, she had just gone downstairs to see if her husband was home from his swing shift job.

“You think the trouble’s all over, then someone else like the Night Stalker comes along,” said Butler, adding that her small Pennsylvania hometown was never like this.

“I’m moving as soon as I can, getting a house, putting in security,” she said. “I’m getting out of here. Three months here, and that’s all I can take.”

“With so many people so close together, you don’t know who’s coming and going,” Butler said.

Cristina Gonzalez is home all day with her three little children, all of them under 4.

“We are all afraid now with this,” she said. “After (the Night Stalker suspect capture), we were calmer. But with what happened yesterday, we’re afraid all over again.”

Sira Gonzales, another neighbor, knows it is hard on her two children, but “they can’t go outside to play or anything.”

“We have been here nine years, and we never let them leave alone,” she said. “There are many bad people, drinkers, hanging out out front. It’s very dangerous. Everybody says so.”

Francisca Salcido, 23, and Salvador Chavarin, 23, live one door away from the Cruz apartment. Both said the woman had talked a lot about El Salvador, about how dangerous it was, about her husband’s death. “That’s why she left.”

Now, Emilia Cruz is grieving again, said Irma Pacheco, 32. She said she introduced herself to the newcomers in the building when they arrived, because “I like to know my neighbors.”

“She was already a widow,” Pacheco said. “She had to come here. There was no way to support herself there. Now she’s here and her daughter is killed . . . . So little and to have such a violent death.”

Late Monday night, deputies arrested Whittier resident Arturo Miranda, 21, at the apartment complex and booked him at Norwalk sheriff’s station on suspicion of murder. Deputies refused to say what had led to the arrest nor whether Miranda was acquainted with the slain child or her family.