Missing Persons

The unseasonably cold, high surf that battered Orange County beaches over the weekend may have claimed a second victim, police said, after a fisherman was reported missing Monday at a south Laguna beach. The family of Ta-Chen Wu, 40, of Rowland Heights told authorities that the man had planned to spend Sunday night fishing from the rocks near Aliso Beach.

A Granada Hills-based volunteer search and rescue team helped find a missing 77-year-old Alzheimer's patient in Griffith Park on Sunday. Mortimer Welkowitz, who had disappeared from his Los Feliz home four days earlier, was found conscious but disoriented, severely dehydrated and with a broken leg, said Brian Humphrey, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Fire Department. He was hospitalized in serious but stable condition.

Authorities intensified their search Sunday for an off-duty Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy missing in the Angeles National Forest since Thursday, a Sheriff's Department spokesman said. About 50 searchers--on foot and in helicopters--combed rugged terrain around Devil's Punchbowl Park for Jonathan Aujay, 38, Deputy Cruz Solis said. Aujay, a dog handler with the department's Special Enforce ment Bureau, often hiked in the area and knows it well, Solis said.

Somewhere during his drive home, perhaps along a stretch of highway in the Mojave Desert known for bikers, methamphetamine labs, chop shops and mine shafts too numerous to count, screenwriter Gary Devore's voice drifted over a cellular phone in the wee hours of June 28, 1997. "Was that you trying to call me, sweetie?" Devore asked his wife, Wendy Oates-Devore, who was waiting for him at their beachfront home in Carpinteria. "Who else would it be at 1 o'clock in the morning?" she asked.

Two snowboarders who set off a massive search when they became lost for more than 24 hours "had a map and they knew what they were doing," the prosecutor argued Thursday as their trial opened on charges of going outside the bounds of the Snow Crest ski resort. "They were snowboarding out of bounds all day and they got lost," said Deputy Dist. Atty. Lonnie Felker. "That's a crime, to knowingly snowboard out of bounds."

The U.S. Army said Friday that it is still investigating the disappearance of a National Guard soldier in Germany and would await the results of an autopsy before confirming whether a body found this week was that of a missing California guardsman. German police tentatively identified the decomposed remains as Spec. Mason Jacques Karl O'Neal, one of 125 National Guard soldiers shipped to Germany from Los Alamitos last summer to be part of the U.S. peacekeeping force in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

FBI agents investigating the disappearance of a 13-year-old girl were called in Wednesday after a decomposed female body was found in rural hills. But Undersheriff Curtis J. Hill of the San Benito Sheriff's Department later said the body did not appear to be that of Christina Williams, who disappeared more than a week ago about 30 miles away.

A charred body believed to be that of a former tennis coach at a prominent San Fernando Valley private school was found in a burned-out car in the Mojave Desert, about a week after he was reported missing, authorities said Thursday. The 1982 Nissan 280Z belonging to Richard Kinuya, 43, of Studio City, a former coach at Harvard-Westlake School, was found Feb. 4, said Sgt. Tom Neely of the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department.

Search and rescue teams braved strong winds and snow Saturday night to look for a 14-year-old snowboarder missing since the afternoon, authorities said. About 30 searchers from the Antelope Valley, Montrose and San Dimas looked for Jeff Thornton, of Brawley, who was last seen at the Mountain High West ski resort about noon, said Sheriff's Lt. Steven Fredericks.

Darell Phillips, a former publisher of the Signal of Santa Clarita, is presumed dead after falling into a swift-moving creek in Central California earlier this week, authorities said. The search will resume Saturday for Phillips, 62, who was publisher of the daily newspaper for eight years until he resigned last June to pursue other business interests.