Reportedly kicking and screaming as the kidnapper grabbed her and threw her into his car. Neighbors are shocked. It’s a small community. Everybody knows each other. Everybody trusts each other. I’m absolutely shocked. I mean, personally I never expected anything like this to happen in a community like this.
Stanton, a small town in Orange County, about 42 km southeast of downtown Los Angeles. One of its residents was a little girl named Samantha Runnion. Samantha’s mom, Erin, worked as an analyst at British Petroleum in Long Beach, California. She chose to live in the Smoke Tree Condominium complex in Stanton because it was considered a safe place for a family.
The neighborhood was close-knit, the kind of place where, as one resident explained, “Our garage door is always open and people are always stopping by to talk. We basically treat it like a patio. The complex was always alive with activity. Hundreds of kids running around, always playing in the courtyard, and Samantha was often among them.” When her mom came home from work, Samantha would hide and then jump out suddenly to surprise her.
Erin always reminded her not to leave the yard. Erin said, “Samantha was kind, loving, everything a child should be. She was happy.” All right, guys. Let me pause for just a second. I’m really curious where you’re all watching from. So, tell me what city are you in and what time is it there right now? Thanks for taking a moment.
Drop it in the comments and I’ll keep going. 5-year-old Samantha and her friend, 6-year-old Sarah, were playing in the yard. Samantha was being watched by her grandmother while her mom and her mom’s boyfriend were at work. The girls were calmly playing a board game when a green car drove by. It circled the block and then came back.
A man got out of the car and asked the girls if they had seen a puppy. He was looking for his lost Chihuahua. Samantha asked how big it was. Suddenly, the man grabbed her and dragged her toward the car. Samantha struggled and screamed, desperately trying to break free, shouting to her best friend, “Go get my grandma.
” She was thrown into the car, the doors slammed shut, and the driver sped away. From that moment on, life for many people would never be the same. Lured into a car by a stranger. One of the latest on the kidnapping and a live report. The child was reportedly kicking and screaming as the kidnapper grabbed her and threw her into his car.
Right now, an intensive search is underway. Samantha and another little girl were playing here on a small street in the Smoke Tree Townhomes complex. Around 6:30 this evening, a man drove up to the girls and asked them to help him find his puppy. When Samantha bent over to ask him about the size of the dog, he grabbed her and drove off.
Samantha’s grandmother was just around the corner, didn’t see anything. Neighbors are shocked. It’s a small community. Everybody knows each other, everybody trusts each other. I don’t know what kind of sick person would do this. I mean, come up in here? What’s wrong with them? I’m absolutely shocked. I mean, personally, I never expected anything like this to happen in the community like this.
Everybody around here like basically watches out for each other, and when something like this happens, it’s depressing and shocking at the same time. Samantha Rinnan was born on 26 Lipnya, 1996, to her father Derek and mother Erin. Erin and Derek later divorced, and Derek moved to Sunderland, Massachusetts, but he remained very close to Samantha.
“I loved her so much,” he said. He talked about the letters and packages he sent her, and all the times she had visited him. Samantha loved sunflowers, superheroes, princess costumes, and the Disney movie Hercules. Hercules was her favorite hero, and she kept his poster above her bed. She was a bright, capable student who had just finished first grade, and now a massive search began to find her.
From the moment she was abducted, the investigation carried an urgent, desperate, intensity, not only because she had been taken in broad daylight in front of her grandmother inside the apartment, and her friend standing nearby, but because every second was literally precious. Her description was released. She was wearing a white blouse, red plaid shorts, and pink sandals with a green frog pattern.
Please ask your captor to let you go. We love you. She is my silly Linda. Please let her go. Search teams and volunteers continued extensive sweeps that had already been underway. Her parents were suddenly terrified. This was a place they had always considered safe. It was a small, friendly town, but now everything felt darker, heavier.
Even though she was only six and had just witnessed something unimaginably terrifying, Samantha’s friend showed remarkable courage and clarity of thought. In a state of shock, she was able to give investigators detailed descriptions of the man who took Samantha and the pale green car he drove. She described him as a man with black hair and a black mustache.
Her testimony helped artists create a composite sketch, which was quickly released to the public. Within hours, law enforcement was stopping hundreds of cars that even remotely matched the vehicle the girl had seen. Her ability to recall these details played a crucial role in moving the investigation forward. It became one of the first and most vital clues in the search for Samantha’s abductor.
Tips and reports started flooding in from across the region and soon the story drew national attention. The fact that she had been taken in broad daylight shocked the community to its core, forcing many parents to question just how safe their streets really were. People clung to hope and prayed with all their hearts, but less than 24 hours after the abduction, that hope was shattered.
Aaron said, “Samantha was kind, loving, everything a child should be. She was happy. Oh my god, we found a dead body. Please hurry up. I’m scared. It’s a little child. It’s a baby.” he said. “I think it might be that little girl on the news. I’m sorry.” He added that he had a 3-year-old child of his own. “Please hurry up. I’m scared.
I want to get out of here.” The operator urged him to stay calm. Investigators quickly made their way to the scene and their worst fears were confirmed. Samantha Rennie’s body had been found. She had been sexually assaulted and struck multiple times in the head causing brain swelling and death resulted from manual strangulation.
The body had been left in a sexually provocative position indicating the work of a sexual predator. FBI agent Richard Garcia noted that the way the body was left was a disturbing message signaling that the offender might strike again. Death occurred between 8:00 p.m. July 15 and 2:00 a.m. July 16.
Samantha was nearly 6 years old. Her grandmother identified the body using photographs. The sheriff expected a significant amount of evidence and more than 500 FBI agents joined the investigation, which quickly became a homicide case. At a press conference, Sheriff Michael Corona addressed the killer directly, issuing a warning. Don’t sleep.
Don’t eat. Cuz we’re coming after you. We will take every resource available to us to bring you to justice. Fear gripped the community. The garage doors that had always been open now stayed shut, and the once close-knit neighbors became rows of private homes behind locked gates. Law enforcement needed a connection to reassure the public.
That link came in the form of Samantha’s friend, the witness to her abduction. The sketch of the man who had taken Samantha was circulated everywhere, and finally his face was linked to a name. A woman named Tommy recognized the person in the sketch and contacted the police. It was likely Alejandro Avalos, a 27-year-old man standing 6’2, strikingly resembling the image.
An intense 4-day police operation ended with his arrest. Orange County Sheriff’s deputies took him into custody after searching an apartment in Lake Elsinore and interrogating him for 12 hours on suspicion of kidnapping and murder. At the time, he was living with his sister Alvi Vera in an apartment on Riverside Drive, while his mother and another sister were just 16 km from the crime scene.
On the day of the abduction, Alejandro was supposed to spend the evening with his family, but instead he drove around Southern California. At 17:18, he withdrew cash from a Bank of America ATM in Lake Elsinore, then stopped twice at gas stations, and around 21:00, checked into a Comfort Inn hotel.
Investigators retraced his route a week later, starting from the cash withdrawal. They pinpointed key locations, the Smoke Tree condominium complex where Samantha was taken, the site where her body was found, and both gas stations. The total distance covered was roughly 325 km with a direct driving time of 3 hours and 24 minutes, or 3 hours and 40 minutes including all stops.
The timing of his arrivals at the complex and the hotel matched the chronology of events on July 15th. Alejandro’s sister noted that he was familiar with the area where the body was found. They had once gone there together to watch a meteor shower. The day after the abduction, he told his sister he had spent the day at the beach and she noticed a fresh scratch on his inner knee.
He claimed it was from safety gate, but his sister noted that the gate was made of smooth plastic and could not have caused such a mark. The fact of the matter is that one’s down, but my baby’s still gone. And there’s still going to be children victimized if we don’t do something to stop it. So, I have to beg you all to help me make sure that we can stop these crimes against our children.
