A Vancouver woman accused of abducting her daughter during a supervised visit last month at Vancouver Mall slipped away with the 4-year-old following a bathroom break, according to court records.
Esmeralda Lopez-Lopez, 21, kidnapped her daughter, Aranza Ochoa-Lopez, on Oct. 25 after asking permission to take the child to the restroom. Instead, she fled with the girl; the visitation worker tried to follow them, he said, but Lopez-Lopez, her daughter and a 16-year-old accomplice fled in a stolen vehicle, according to a search warrant affidavit.
Family says Lopez-Lopez and her daughter are in Mexico.
Aranza was placed in foster care in 2017 following founded complaints of physical abuse by Lopez-Lopez. The girl was reportedly covered in large bruises, and Lopez-Lopez was deemed a danger based on the history of abuse, her lack of participation in a mental health assessment and her erratic behavior. She was granted twice weekly supervised visitation, according to a search warrant affidavit.
Several search warrant and probable cause affidavits detail how the group’s plan came together.
About two weeks before the abduction, Lopez-Lopez threw a party at her apartment and told her friends she was going to lose custody of her daughter and wanted to abduct her from Child Protective Services. The group agreed to help her, a search warrant affidavit states.
A week before the plan was to be carried out, Lopez-Lopez contacted her aunt in Mexico and said she was going to take Aranza from CPS and cross the border, the affidavit says.
Initially, the plan did not include the kidnapping of Jose Orellana-Gomez, who dated Lopez-Lopez in December 2017. However, the day before the child abduction, someone punctured a tire on her vehicle, and she needed a vehicle to carry out her plan. She also reportedly said she didn’t want to drive a car registered in her name. Lopez-Lopez contacted the group via Snapchat and told them of her plan to steal Orellana-Gomez’s car, a search warrant affidavit states.
Orellana-Gomez told investigators that Lopez-Lopez lured him to her Vancouver apartment under the premise that she needed a ride to Centralia. But when he got to the apartment, several people, armed with kitchen knives and wearing masks, entered the apartment, pushed him down, bound him with duct tape and carried him to a bedroom where he was taped to an office chair. They blindfolded and gagged him and placed headphones over his ears. The assailants demanded his car, a red Chevrolet Cobalt, and told him they would only need it a few hours. They also took his debit card and demanded the PIN, court documents say.
Garcia-Valdovinos said he guarded Orellana-Gomez during the night and assisted in taking him to the bathroom. He and Hernandez-Reyes purchased a roll of duct tape, a car seat for the trip to Mexico and clothing to dress Aranza as a boy. Hernandez-Reyes also purchased over-the-counter sleeping medication to give to Orellana-Gomez in the apartment. Xulu-Sop told police he stayed in the room with Orellana-Gomez for most of the night talking to the man, giving him water and playing music, according to probable cause affidavits filed in their cases.
Orellana-Gomez estimated he was held in the room for more than 15 hours, before he managed to free himself from the chair. He jumped from a second-story window — his hands and ankles still bound with tape — and hopped to a passerby who called 911 for him, court records state.
Lopez-Lopez reportedly wrote an apology in Spanish on Orellana-Gomez’s leg, with a small heart drawn next to it, according to a probable cause affidavit.
While officers searched her apartment, a CPS worker told them that Lopez-Lopez had fled with her child during a supervised visit that same day. She fled with her daughter and Trigueros in Orellana-Gomez’s stolen car. Video surveillance obtained from the mall shows Lopez-Lopez arriving in her car with Trigueros and then two males parking Orellana-Gomez’s car next to it, according to court documents.
Trigueros’ mother had reported her as a runaway and told investigators she was last known to be staying with Lopez-Lopez. Based on text messages and a call Trigueros made to her grandparents in Mexico, they planned to take Aranza to La Libertad, near the Mexico-Guatemala border, a search warrant affidavit says.
After Lopez-Lopez fled with her daughter, she allegedly used Orellana-Gomez’s debit card later that day at a McDonald’s in Coburg, Ore. Employees later confirmed for investigators that the mother and the two girls stopped there, according to a search warrant affidavit.
Phone records and messages on social media, particularly Facebook, led investigators to Garcia-Valdovinos who identified the others involved, court records say. And on Nov. 14, Trigueros turned herself in to authorities at the U.S.-Mexico border and was extradited to Clark County.
Since the abduction, Lopez-Lopez has reportedly reached out to Hernandez-Reyes through a messaging app and asked him to call 911 and report her being seen in the Seattle area. He did not, however, a search warrant affidavit states.
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