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2 missing California sisters found alive after 36 years

By Andrew Chamings

Thirty-six years after two young sisters were found crying, abandoned on the wet floor of a California public restroom, their identities have been revealed. The search for the person who killed Jasmin and Elizabeth Ramos’ mother, however, is still underway. 

On December 12, 1989, an unidentified woman was found unclothed and stabbed to death on Old Temple Bar Road, about 50 miles south of Las Vegas, in Mohave County, Arizona. All attempts to identify her at the time were unsuccessful.

The body remained a Jane Doe until February 2022, when fingerprints taken from the victim were submitted to the FBI and resulted in a match to a woman named Maria Ortiz in Bakersfield. When police contacted a possible associate of Ortiz, that person said they had no knowledge of that name but did have a cousin named Marina Ramos. Ramos had been missing since 1989 alongside her two daughters, ages 2 months and 14 months at the time. 

Further investigation, involving DNA taken from family members, revealed that Ramos was the Jane Doe, and that she was last seen with her daughters and a man known only has “Fernando” in a black vehicle, allegedly heading from Bakersfield to his home in Ontario, California, near Los Angeles, the Mohave County Sheriff’s Office said in February 2023.

After identifying Ramos, for the past two years, investigators have been trying to find out what happened to her two daughters, Jasmin and Elizabeth. Last month, through DNA testing provided by Ramos’ family members, genealogists identified a woman who had a high probability of being one of the missing girls. After contacting her, investigators learned that she and her sister were abandoned as infants in a park in Southern California in 1989.

The woman’s sister then provided newspaper clippings to investigators from the week in 1989 when they were found. “Abandoned babies healthy,” read one headline. “County searches for parents,” read another.

On Dec. 14, 1989, two days after Ramos’ body was found in Arizona, a passerby heard children crying in a woman’s restroom in a park in Oxnard, in Ventura County. The man asked a woman to check the bathroom, where she found the two girls lying on the wet floor without an adult. 

The unidentified infants were placed in child protective services custody, and later placed into foster care. “The girls were eventually adopted by a couple in Ventura County and were raised together in a loving home,” the sheriff’s department said in a statement. 

Jasmin and Elizabeth’s adopted names were Tina and Melissa, and they learned of their abandonment and adoption in their teenage years, KNXV-TV reports. “This is what I’ve been searching for and wanting for a very, very long time, and to figure out where I came from and who my family was,” Tina told the outlet. 

Focus has now turned back to the killing of the girls’ mother, Marina Ramos, and the search for a suspect or suspects. A witness in the area in 1989 told officers that she saw a woman and two men with the children at the park in Oxnard. They were seen driving a black mini pickup, the sheriff said. The witness saw a Hispanic woman wearing a long red skirt and white boots carrying the smaller child in a yellow blanket and one of the males carrying the older child. In 2023, the sheriff shared a composite sketch of a man known only as “Fernando,” whom investigators were looking to identify.

“This case has always been a challenge and continues to be one,” lead investigator Lori Miller told SFGATE over email. “There have been major obstacles met along the way. Identifying Marina was a victory. Finding her daughters alive and well was another major victory. It was extremely satisfying and overwhelming. The sense of joy I felt cannot be expressed in words. Now the challenge becomes to identify and locate Marina’s killers.”

Anyone with information is asked to contact the Mohave County Sheriff’s Office special investigations unit at at 928-753-0753, ext. 4408.