March 26--Orange County investigators are analyzing a car located Wednesday that belonged to a woman who vanished after a night out on Valentine's Day.
Orange County Sheriff's Department deputies said they located a white Honda Civic belonging to Erica Alonso around 2 p.m. Wednesday in the Glenwood Park neighborhood of Aliso Viejo -- a leafy, master-planned community.
"I'm shaking," the woman's father said Wednesday. "I'm really just hoping that ... she's not dead."
Since Alonso vanished after a late night at a Costa Mesa nightclub, her family has held vigils and posted missing-person signs everywhere from Anaheim to Lake Elsinore.
"We haven't stopped since we knew," her father, Isaac Alonso Sr., said in an interview in late February. "We're not going to give up. We have a feeling that she is alive somewhere."
One of six children, 27-year-old Erica Alonso had planned to babysit for her brother on Valentine's Day, but he called and said the family had decided to stay in, her father said.
Alonso and her off-and-on boyfriend instead spent the day together and went to a Costa Mesa nightclub to have drinks, Orange County Sheriff's spokesman Jeff Hallock said.
At the nightclub, they met a couple who offered to drive them to the boyfriend's house in Irvine in the early morning hours Sunday. Alonso made friends easily, her father said.
"That smile that you see in her pictures? She was like that all the time," he said.
The couple left the Irvine home around 3:45 a.m., after Alonso and the boyfriend began to argue. Alonso may have left 15 minutes later, according to Hallock.
She hasn't been seen since.
"She knows that we are looking for her, she knows that we are suffering," her father said. "She would be welcomed home anytime."
