Men Take Baby Girl--Police Find Body : Crime: Kidnapers grab the 3-month-old child as her mother walks to a store in Orange. The case is similar to a foiled abduction two weeks ago in Buena Park.

ORANGE —  A 3-month-old girl, who was reportedly kidnaped from her mother on the sidewalk and thrown into a car, was found dead three hours later behind a shopping center, police said Monday.

Results of an autopsy, including the cause of death, were withheld “because it may jeopardize the case,” said Sgt. Jim Hudson, an Orange police spokesman.

“We’re not ruling anybody out as suspects at this point,” Hudson said, adding that no arrests had been made late Monday.

Rocio Cazares Huerta, 23, told officers that she was walking about 9:15 p.m. Sunday to a neighborhood store with the infant when two men drove up in a four-door tan sedan in the 1800 block of Collins Avenue, near North Tustin Avenue.

The men suddenly grabbed the child and “threw” her into the back seat and drove off, she said.

Hudson said Huerta described the two as Latinos wearing white T-shirts. She last saw them traveling west on Collins, she told police.

Officers arrived and fanned out into surrounding neighborhoods, Hudson said, and found the infant’s body about midnight about “one block north” of the abduction site--near a moving van parked behind a hair salon in the 1000 block of North Tustin Avenue.

Police would not say whether there were visible wounds on the child’s body, how she was dressed or exactly where she was found.

“We do not want to jeopardize the investigation,” Hudson said. “There are questions only a certain number of people might know the answers to.”

The kidnaping is similar to a case in Buena Park two weeks ago, when a man abducted a 6-year-old girl as she was walking home with her mother from a grocery store.

In that May 9 incident, the unidentified man grabbed the youngster near the intersection of Brenda and Belle avenues about 8:30 p.m. and carried her away, Buena Park police said.

Police said the mother screamed for someone to call police and yelled for witnesses to help chase down the suspect, who at one point lifted the child over a fence bordering a shopping center and dropped her on the other side, got over the fence, picked the girl back up and continued his getaway.

A pursuing witness finally caught up and freed the child from the abductor, who reportedly fled north on Valley View Street on a bicycle, police said.

Hudson of the Orange police was not available to comment on any possible ties between the Buena Park incident and the Orange case. Huerta also could not be reached.

Owners of stores near where the infant’s body was found said they had closed by the time police converged on the area, a mix of strip malls lining Tustin Avenue and apartments and homes off the main thoroughfare.

Charlie Park, who operates a liquor store next to the hair salon, said he closed his store about 9 p.m. Police met him when he opened his store Monday morning.

“There were four policemen here this morning asking questions,” Park said.

“We’ve never had any trouble here,” he said. “It’s a nice place we have. There are always a lot of officers around for us.”

Times staff writer Nancy Wride contributed to this story.