Bizarre Search For Kidnapped Boy Recovers Multiple Stolen Vehicles

Seven of nine?

There's a story out here in central California,I don't know how much attention it is getting in other parts of the country, but a little four year old boy was kidnapped, apparently by an old boyfriend of his mom's.

An eyewitness saw a car that fit the description of the one owned by the suspect, and said he saw a man and a small child in the car, as it plunged into the Delta Mendota canal, a waterway that transports drinking water to southern California.

Then, the story started getting weird. The incident happened about a week ago, and sure enough, a vehicle was found in the canal, but it wasn't the right one. The next day, another vehicle was found. Still not the right one. So far, in the last week, nine vehicles: seven cars, a pickup truck and a motorcycle have been pulled from the canal. Most, if not all of them, were stolen.

Divers continue to pull abandoned vehicles out of the Delta Mendota canal near Patterson in hopes of finding a car from an Amber Alert for a missing young boy.

Crews using sonar technology have found and removed seven cars, a pickup truck and a motorcycle from the canal, none of them matched the description of Rodriguez's car.

A Honda that was reported stolen awhile ago was pulled out Tuesday morning, followed a little while later by a motorcycle, a pickup truck and an Izuzu.

4-year-old Juliani Cardenas was taken from his grandmother's arms a week from her Patterson home. She identified the suspect as 27-year-old Jose Esteban Rodriguez. Rodriguez dated Cardenas' mother for awhile before they recently broke up.

The search continues for the little boy and for the car, and there's still hope and we pray that the little boy will be found alive, but...with all those rusting hulks at the bottom of the canal, the folks in Southern California have certainly been getting a lot of minerals with their water!

Oh, one other thing. Some folk are wondering why officials don't simply drain the canal and reveal what must be hundreds of cars submerged in its waters. The figure I heard today was that it would take 8- 10 hours to drain the canal, at a cost to the state of $3,000,000 an hour in lost revenues. That's right. Three million, with an "M".