LOS ANGELES — A 6-year-old survived alone for 10 days in a remote ravine alongside her dead mother's body after their car plunged off a highway and came to rest under a tree.
Relatives lambasted the police on Wednesday for not finding the two soon after they were reported missing April 5.
"This is an outrage," a relative, Rose Lopez, said to reporters outside a hospital in Moreno Valley, where the child, Ruby Bustamante, was being cared for. "Someone needs to be held accountable for this. There's no excuse for a young mother being left to die and a child to have to go through such a horrific ordeal."
Hungry, thirsty and bruised, Ruby was found on Tuesday morning after highway workers spotted her next to the wreckage of the car, which had fallen 150 feet off a Riverside County road 75 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. The workers had been dispatched to fix a metal guardrail and had no idea, they said later, that a car lay in the ravine below.
"They initially noticed some movement down there, which was the girl," Chris Blondon, a California Highway Patrol officer who was called to the scene, said. "Then they noticed the car down there."
Ruby survived by eating dried noodles and drinking Gatorade, and she had arranged her meager supplies into a tidy dining area in the dirt next to her mother's Ford Taurus.
"She had kind of set everything out in an orderly fashion her food and fluid, and her shoes on the ground outside the vehicle," Blondon said.
The car showed signs of having rolled onto its roof at least once as it careened down the steep embankment, he said. Its windows were shattered and its airbags had deployed.
"I would class it as a miracle for a 5-year-old to survive that," Blondon said of the accident and the girl's 10-day ordeal in the ravine. Nighttime temperatures in the area dipped to less than 50 degrees in the past few days, meteorological records showed.
An autopsy was performed on Wednesday on Ruby's 26-year-old mother, Norma Bustamante, whose death from multiple injuries "likely occurred within minutes of the accident," said Sgt. Shelley Kennedy-Smith of the Riverside County Sheriff's Department.
California Highway Patrol officials said they had received a call from a motorist on April 4 reporting that a car had been seen going over the side of Highway 60, a four-lane road east of Moreno Valley.
"We sent a unit out there, with no results," Blondon said, adding that a California Department of Forestry crew also searched the vicinity. The call, he said, had not been specific.
Law enforcement officials in Indio, where the Bustamante family lives, said they had entered the pair's names and details about the Ford Taurus in a national registry of missing people following a call from the family on April 5, a day after Bustamante and her daughter were last seen.
"We also put out an all-points bulletin in our city and in all of the Coachella Valley," said Cmdr. Mark Miller of the Indio police. "During the next week we had several more contacts with the family, but there was not much additional information that could help us."
The body of Norma Bustamante was found about 15 feet from the car, although it was not yet known whether she had been ejected from the vehicle or had moved herself away from it and then died.
Family members who complained on Wednesday that authorities had failed to follow up on reports that Bustamante and Ruby were missing were so upset that they broke up the news conference outside the hospital and asked reporters to leave.
Lopez said officials had cited insufficient personnel as a reason for not mounting a full-fledged search. "The family was told to do their own search due to the lack of law enforcement," she said. -->
Dr. Webster Wong, one of the physicians attending to Ruby at the Riverside County Regional Medical Center, said that her stay there would be short.
"She's smiling," he said. "She's watching TV, and she's happy to be surrounded by her family again."