Daily Press Staff Writer CULVER CITY — It’s been a long journey home for Margaret Rose Roberts, the 62-year-old Sunset Park woman who went missing more than a month ago and prompted her husband to engage in a tireless search of the region, but one with a happy ending thanks to an observant City Hall employee.
On Friday, with a June 23 edition of the Santa Monica Daily Press in tow, Santa Monica Building and Safety inspector Shane Peters stopped at the Starbucks at Washington Boulevard and Overland Avenue for his morning brew. Glancing at the front page of the newspaper, he saw a picture of Roberts and the accompanying story detailing her disappearance on May 21.
The missing woman looked eerily similar to a woman at the coffee shop, a woman he has seen there repeatedly over the past six weeks.
According to Jeri Wingo, president of the city’s Municipal Employees Association, Peters called Roberts’ husband, Rejelio Muñoz, whose number was printed in the Friday edition of the newspaper, and described the woman at the cafe. Later in the day, the couple was reunited for the first time since Roberts, who suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, wandered away from their 31st Street home one Sunday morning in May.
“He (Peters) went to the house and described her — a chain smoker with a cough — and just knew that he was right,” said Wingo, adding that Peters preferred to keep his efforts low key. “He had been seeing her (Roberts) at the Starbucks for weeks.
“He’s a good person.”
The reunited couple had planned to seek medical treatment on Friday for Roberts, believed to be without her psychiatric medication for the extent of time she was missing, a likely factor in her abnormal behavior. She also is said to have a chronic lung illness that requires medication.
For Muñoz, finding his lost wife is the end of a harried journey that took him through the underbelly of Los Angeles County, having mounted daily searches to not only places they frequented together as a couple over the past 35 years, but to alleys, underpasses and parks that homeless people tended to gather and seek shelter.
In searching for his wife, Muñoz was not content to leave it up to authorities, taking to the streets and distributing missing-person flyers at motels, hotels, parks, shelters and liquor stores — anywhere he thought there was a chance for a sighting. Recently, his brother arrived from Arkansas to lend emotional support and aid in the search for Roberts.
“I think it’s great that it was one of us,” Wingo said. “It shows that city employees care.”
