AFTER THE RIOTS: THE SEARCH FOR ANSWERS : Mother Prays, Burns Candles for Disabled Girl Missing in Riot

At an altar in her apartment, Marta Estrada has knelt the last several nights before a lighted candle and prayed for the return of her daughter, missing since riots swept the family’s Pico-Union neighborhood near downtown last week.

“I’ve lit the candle so that God will help me find her,” said Estrada, 32, who has been searching desperately for the mentally disabled 14-year-old girl who wandered away from home and vanished during a looting spree in their community Thursday night. “My heart has been torn to pieces.”

The grieving mother said Wednesday that she fears Zuly Estrada, who has the mental capacity of an 8-year-old and cannot read or write, may have fallen into the hands of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service--or worse.

One of hundreds of tragic stories stemming from last week’s rioting, her case has taken on a political edge because of the potential involvement of immigration authorities, whose participation in policing the violence has proved controversial in the heavily Latino Pico-Union District.

About 400 U.S. Border Patrol agents were dispatched to Los Angeles during the disturbances. In addition, INS personnel based in Los Angeles worked extra shifts and overtime in an effort to quell the unrest. Los Angeles police, in conflict with their own internal policy, turned over scores of foreign-born suspects to INS authorities during the crisis.

Between Friday and midnight Tuesday, 477 illegal immigrants were taken into INS custody, according to Robert M. Moschorak, INS district director in Los Angeles. The great majority--360--were Mexican citizens, most of whom have since been shipped by bus to Tijuana, Moschorak said.

“I think it was an insult to us that they sent immigration officers into our neighborhood,” said City Councilman Mike Hernandez, one of many Latino leaders who denounced the INS involvement at a news conference Wednesday.

Her mother fears that Zuly, a Mexican citizen in this country without proper documentation, may have been among those shipped back to her homeland. Estrada is a legal U.S. resident.

Immigration officials insist that records indicate Zuly has not turned up in any of the detention facilities in Los Angeles or San Pedro, and police say her name is not to be found on any arrest sheet.

But Estrada said other immigrants who have been held at the INS’s detention center in San Pedro recognized a photograph of the girl that she took to the facility on Monday.

The mother also fears her child may have been injured or disoriented during the rioting and cannot find her way home.

Estrada last saw her daughter as they stood together on the second-floor balcony of their apartment building and “watched the fires and destruction all around us,” she said. “I went inside for a minute, and, when I went back out, she was gone.”

Later, a neighborhood girl told Estrada that she saw Zuly shortly before midnight Thursday in the parking lot of a market near Westlake Avenue and 8th Street, where she was knocked down by looters.

Zuly, who is 5 feet 4 and has curly black hair and black eyes, was wearing black pants, a black blouse with a red rose print and white tennis shoes when she disappeared, Estrada said.

“Mrs. Estrada is out of her wits with fear,” said Gwen Jordan of the Lanterman Regional Center in Los Angeles, a nonprofit, state-funded social service organization for developmentally disabled children. “We’ve checked hospitals, police stations and immigration centers, to no avail.”