LOS ANGELES -- Las Vegas police followed a pair of suspected kidnappers on a 100-mile drive through the Nevada desert, and then safely recovered a 7-year-old boy who was snatched off the streets of Riverside, they said Saturday.
Eduardo Rivera was not in the stopped van, but the men inside it gave police the address of a home in east Las Vegas police raided at 5 a.m. and found the boy asleep. Several other children and a woman were also found there, and the woman is being questioned about Rivera's presence there, police said.
"He looks like he's in very good health," said Metro Police Sgt. Dave Stansbury. "He was scared at first but now he is smiling and seems to be enjoying all the attention."
Las Vegas Metro Police were led to the house by a pair of men driving a Toyota van seen in Riverside, when the boy was snatched off a street while walking from his foster home to school. The kidnapping occurred near Cole Avenue and Kinnow Lane while the boy was walking to Mark Twain Elementary School in the company of three children who described the kidnapping to police.
Police said as many as three vehicles were involved in the kidnapping.
Both of Rivera's parents are in jail, in Santa Ana and San Bernardino. Riverside police questioned the boy's parents to see if a jail grudge or some other criminal conspiracy might have ended in the boy being kidnapped for revenge or ransom.
At 8 p.m. Friday night, a tipster phoned Metro Police to say a sought-after van was in the parking lot of a casino in Laughlin, Nev. Police staked out the van, and saw two men emerge from the casino and drive to Las Vegas.
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Stansbury said the pair apparently became lost, and started making circles in the downtown and strip area in Las Vegas.
"We decided it was time to call this thing off, and we initiated a stop,'' Stansbury said.
"One of them immediately told us the address of the house where the boy was," he said.
The two men from the van and the woman in the house were being questioned, Stansbury said.
Agents with the FBI in Riverside and Las Vegas assisted police in recovering Eduardo, according to Los Angeles-based FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller.
"The FBI in Riverside worked all night with Riverside police to get information on the boy's location," Eimiller said. "The boy is in FBI custody in Las Vegas right now."
Riverside police detectives were on the way to Nevada to bring Eduardo back to California, where he will likely be placed in protective custody, according to Eimiller.
