When Rosa Ohm and her husband Ramiro Herrera were visiting Hansen Dam Recreational Park in Lake View Terrace for a birthday party early last week, Herrera decided to take advantage of the warm, clear weather to do one of his favorite things: take a long outdoor walk.
“They both walked an hour-and-a-half six days out of the week. They were always walking or hiking, and my stepdad loved nature,” said Gabby Conde of Chatsworth, about her mother, 73, and 83-year-old Herrera. But this solo walk had tragic consequences – Herrera never returned.
Conde and other relatives organized daily search parties, ranging from 15 people the first day to nearly 100 by the third day – with limited help from local authorities, stressed Conde. Three days after Herrera went missing, a search party volunteer made the heartbreaking discovery: his body was found in the Hansen Dam Lake. The preliminary cause of death was accidental drowning.
“My mom thought the police were going to do more. She told me, ‘I can’t believe we’re the ones who found him,’” recounted Conde. “We’re all really disappointed that we didn’t get the help that we needed from the LAPD [Los Angeles Police Department]. If we had, maybe things would have turned out differently.”
As the grieving family plans a funeral for Herrera in Monterey Park, near the couple’s East LA home, they’re wrought with thoughts of “what ifs” – what if officers had used search dogs or conducted a timely and thorough search by the lake, as relatives asked them to do many times?
“On that first day, I asked them, ‘Well, can you send out [search] dogs? Maybe if the dogs can pick up his scent, they can find him,’” recalled Conde. She said they told her that wasn’t an option to use a K-9 unit for the search because “they didn’t have the financial resources.”
The Day He Went Missing
Herrera – known as “Willie” to loved ones – left the park party to start his walk about 1:30 p.m. on Sunday, Aug. 9. When her husband hadn’t returned by 3 p.m., Ohm immediately knew something was wrong. That’s when the family contacted the LAPD to report him missing.
LAPD officers and park rangers conducted an initial search of Hansen Dam Park via their vehicles, drones and a helicopter, but the helicopter search lasted “about five minutes,” noted Conde. Relatives and friends searched for Herrera themselves from the afternoon until 1 a.m., many hours after LAPD officers and the park rangers had gone home. They felt abandoned.
“Within three hours of [arriving], the officers left us,” said Ohm. “And the park rangers kept telling us that [my husband] wasn’t in the park – that they had already done a thorough search.”
“I even asked him, ‘Are you leaving us here alone to fend for ourselves in this situation?’’ added Conde in frustration. “And they replied, ‘No, we’re going to leave, but we’ll look around to see if he’s on the streets somewhere.’”
After the family made and distributed hundreds of missing person flyers, and posted information online on the second day Herrera was missing, they received calls from two possible eyewitnesses. Both claimed they had seen a man matching Herrera’s description by the lake, and said he appeared injured.
Their accounts matched a tip Conde’s son received the previous day. While searching for Herrera, an unhoused man told him he had seen Herrera near the lake with a head injury; he said Herrera asked him to find his wife at the park. He didn’t find her, but reported the incident to a park ranger, who followed him back to the spot where he had seen Herrera, but Herrera was gone.
Despite the family’s repeated requests to conduct additional searches in and near the lake, Conde said the park rangers told the family they had searched around the lake but hadn’t seen anything.
“I felt like they just didn’t care,” she said about both the park rangers and LAPD officers. “One of the officers said, ‘We looked for him in [local] liquor stores.’ But my dad didn’t even drink!
“He was such a sweet man,” continued Conde. “He was always really respectful and a man of his home. He loved his home and he also loved the outdoors. I told my mom, it’s such [painful] irony that he passed away that way, in the outdoors, in nature, which he always loved so much.”
While the LAPD and LA County Sheriff’s Department did put out missing person and “silver” alerts for Herrera, the timeline is unclear. Conde said they are considering requesting an investigation to determine if the officers and park rangers involved followed established protocols for missing person cases, and if the search was limited due to a lack of resources.
The family is also awaiting the results of a full autopsy.
While Conde wants more information to understand why it seems there wasn’t more persistence to find Herrera, she also hopes blue light emergency phones can be set up throughout the large recreational park – similar to the ones on some college campuses – so that another tragic incident like this “doesn’t happen to another family.”
The San Fernando Valley Sun/el Sol requested comment from the LAPD regarding this case, but they did not reply by press time.