Runaway Children

Each Monday morning, the nightmares of desperate parents land on Marvin McCoin's desk at the Lancaster Sheriff's Station in the form of about 20 missing-teenager reports. Compiled by deputies, they contain the names and phone numbers of the youths' acquaintances, and other helpful clues that McCoin, a 72-year-old volunteer, will need to try to track down the week's batch of runaways and overnight revelers too busy having fun to call home. From Monday through Thursday, starting at 6:30 a.m.

Authorities were searching Wednesday night for two brothers, ages 10 and 5, who were reported missing in the midmorning and then later seen wandering the streets of Huntington Beach. The apparent runaways, Tuan and Tonycong Nguyen, were last seen by a family member at 11 a.m. when an uncle tending to them at their Midway City home went on an errand, said Lt. Lynn Nehring of the Orange County Sheriff's Department.

It was every parent's nightmare. And on Father's Day, no less. But for Eileen Gonzalez, who scrambled out of her car to rescue a desperate, lost little boy running in traffic on Topanga Canyon Boulevard, it was an experience that both touched and broke her heart. "He is such a wonderful little boy, and I thank God I found him and took care of him," said Gonzalez, 21, who grabbed the 3-year-old after he was nearly struck by a van in the wee hours of Sunday morning.

Sweep the romance from the streets; it makes for a clearer picture. There's nothing dreamy about the Boulevard. Just a ribbon of asphalt studded with glitter dust--winking, tweaking the illusion. If one looks hard enough, there rises an allusion to the past, dim and broken like false promise. No matter. Los Angeles, Hollywood proper, is its own Ellis Island for so many seeking something other, some sense of liberation. Specifics are an afterthought.

A pregnant 10-year-old girl who ran away on Sunday and had been sought by authorities in the United States and Mexico was taken into custody by Houston police late Wednesday, according to news reports. The reports on local television said her 22-year-old boyfriend, charged Tuesday with aggravated sexual assault of a child, was also being held by police. The girl is 8 1/2 months' pregnant.

A teen-age boy whose silence since being found half-frozen on a ferry last week puzzled police and captivated the public was identified Friday as a runaway from Berlin. Police in the southern town of Kristiansand, where the boat docked, said the boy's mother identified him as her son, 14-year-old Natanael Kieckhoefer, after she saw his picture in a German newspaper Friday. The boy was found Nov. 15, half-frozen in a lifeboat aboard a passenger ferry traveling from Denmark to Norway.

The father of 13-year-old Wendy Macias solemnly recounted Tuesday the events that led to his daughter running away from home and ultimately getting shot and killed by stray gunfire in South-Central Los Angeles. In the small South-Central home that Wendy shared with her parents and five brothers and sisters, Carlo Macias, 43, recalled how Wendy slipped out of the house Sunday night to meet her boyfriend at Exposition Park. Macias caught them.

A 13-year-old runaway was killed by a bullet intended for a gang member just after she called her mother from a pay phone in the Athens district of South-Central Los Angeles and asked her to pick her up and take her home, authorities said Monday. The killing of Wendy Macias had a special poignancy for law enforcement officers. The girl was a candidate for the Explorer Scout program in the LAPD's Newton Division.

Two weeks after she embarked on a cross-country journey, apparently prompted by an electronic computer message, 13-year-old Tara J. Noble was reunited with her family early Monday as federal investigators sought to determine how she was lured from her home in Kentucky. The Los Padrinos Child Detention Center in Downey released the girl to her parents at 1 a.m. Monday, less than 24 hours after she had contacted the Los Angeles FBI office and had been taken into protective custody by police.

A 13-year-old Kentucky girl, apparently lured away from home by an electronic computer message nearly two weeks ago, was taken into protective custody in Los Angeles on Sunday after she contacted authorities. Tara J. Noble called the local FBI office shortly after 8 a.m., a spokesman said, and agents notified Los Angeles police, who picked the girl up at a phone booth on Hollywood Boulevard about half an hour later. "She's OK," Tara's mother, Lisa Noble, said in a telephone interview from St.