Reunion For 4-Year-Old NY Girl

The grandmother of a 4-year-old girl found wandering a Queens street after her mother vanished plans to travel from Bolivia to reunite with the girl, the Bolivian consul general said Tuesday.

Roxana Rivadineira is also holding out hope that her missing daughter, who authorities said was murdered, will be found safe.

"She hopes she remains alive," said Consul General Jorge Heredia. He said Rivadineira is awaiting a travel visa at the American consulate in La Paz. "She's desperate to see her granddaughter," he said.

The girl, Valery Belen Saavedra Lozada, has been in foster care since the disappearance of her 26-year-old mother, Monica Lozada-Rivadineira, on Sept. 24.

The mother's companion, Cesar Ascarrunz, 32, is being held without bail on a murder charge.

According to a criminal complaint, Ascarrunz choked Lozada-Rivadineira, put her body in a plastic bag and left it in their apartment for two days. On Sept. 26, he dumped the body in a pile of trash on a Queens street corner, the complaint said. He is also charged with endangering the welfare of a child for allegedly abandoning Valery.

On Monday, police expanded the search for the mother's body to two Pennsylvania landfills that take New York City trash. Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said he doubted that sanitation workers would have collected the trash without discovering the body.

Investigators got a dozen tips from the public after child welfare officials took the unusual step of putting Valery on television. The child, who described her mother as looking "like a princess," is staying with a foster family in Queens while child-welfare officials try to decide who she should live with.

"A number of relatives have come forward," said Lisi de Bourbon, a spokeswoman for the Administration for Children's Services. "We are very carefully deciding who would be best qualified to care for Valery."

The agency will make a recommendation to a family court judge who will decide where to place the girl, de Bourbon said.

The only relatives Valery has seen since she was found barefoot in the middle of the night are her grandmother's brother, Enrique Salas, and Salas' daughter, Youvanska.

Salas, who visited with Valery on Saturday, told The New York Times that she sang and counted in English and Spanish for him.

"She was playful, she was happy and she looked beautiful, as she always does," the little girl's great-uncle told the Times in Tuesday editions.

"I got very emotional, but I tried not to let her see me cry," Salas said. "We didn't want to make her sad; she has gone through enough already. We played and sang, but it gave me great pain to watch her there, so defenseless and with no idea that her mother was gone."

Salas said Valery and her parents left Cochabamba, Bolivia, three years ago and lived for a year in Santa Ana, Calif. After the marriage broke up, the mother and child lived with Salas in Corona, Queens, for about eight months before she was able to find work and rent her own apartment.

Ascarrunz returned to New York last year after studying to become a gynecologist in Bolivia and had talked about marrying Lozada-Rivadineira.

"She told me she wanted to get to know him better before she made any commitments," Salas said.