LOS ANGELES, June 3 (UPI) -- Police and sheriff's deputies had no new progress to report Monday as they continued searching for two children who vanished separately and under circumstances that were both mysterious and chilling.
There was no sign of an 11-year-old Altadena girl who was forced to leave her home with her father, who later turned up dead -- his death a suicide -- hundreds of miles away, nor did searchers find any trace of a little boy who vanished over the weekend from a Westside birthday party.
"This is any parent's worst nightmare," said a PTA volunteer from the missing boy's elementary school as she passed out flyers seeking information about Paolo Ayala, the brown-eyed 7-year-old who was last seen Sunday afternoon at a birthday party in the upscale Holmby Hills area. "We are a family and when one of your family is in trouble, you band together."
Police late Monday flew in a bloodhound from Riverside County to give the affluent west Los Angeles neighborhood another going over. A previous search by other dogs turned up Paolo's scent, but it vanished at Santa Monica Blvd.
The boy's father, Franklin Ayala, said Paolo was a friendly kid who might have wandered away from the party to play in a nearby park.
"I should have stayed with him," he lamented to reporters Monday morning.
The trail of 11-year-old Jeanene Bonner of Altadena appeared to be growing colder Monday, two weeks after she left her home with her father for what was supposed to have been a trip to Lake Havasu, Ariz.
Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies said Bonner and her father, Joaquin Garcia, failed to return on the 24th. Five days later, Garcia was found dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot in rural Butte County, more than 400 miles north of the Los Angeles area.
There was no sign of Bonner in Garcia's vehicle other than some of her clothes.
"She's a really bright girl, so I know, if she was able to get to a phone or to ... make a call, she would do it," her uncle, Henry Bonner, said at a news conference late last week.
