A Wrong Turn on Lovers’ Lane : Crime: A Pomona woman’s romance crashed, she says, when her boyfriend refused to return her car, and police stalled on calling it stolen.

Sandra Luipage of Pomona loaned her car to her boyfriend in April, but she was the one taken for a ride.

Her boyfriend wouldn’t return the black 1988 Honda Prelude, stalling her for nearly a month with promises, she said. The romance cooled when he kept the car, and it fizzled entirely when he was arrested May 16 in Garden Grove in a botched holdup attempt in which an armored-car guard was shot.

Until last week, said Luipage, a 24-year-old single mother, she was trapped in a bureaucratic nightmare, trying to persuade authorities that her car was no longer just on loan, but stolen. She said her jailed ex-boyfriend didn’t have the car when he was arrested but had passed it on to someone else.

When she first reported the matter in May, she said, the Pomona Police Department told her that since she had loaned her car voluntarily, it was a civil matter that she should pursue with a private attorney.

Luipage, who is jobless and on welfare, said she went through the phone book calling attorneys without finding anyone interested in taking her case.

She returned to the Police Department, which agreed to take a report on the vehicle as an embezzled car if she would send a certified letter to her ex-boyfriend, now in the Orange County jail, demanding her car back.

But even after she sent the letter, Luipage said, the car was not immediately entered in the state computerized list of stolen and embezzled vehicles. Thus, she said, authorities in Los Angeles cited her car for a parking violation June 12 and mailed her a ticket for $53, instead of impounding the car.

Finally, last Thursday, Pomona police told Luipage--who is not suspected of any crime--they had placed her Prelude on the stolen-car list.

Pomona Police Capt. Chuck Heilman said police have become cautious about taking reports on stolen cars because so many vehicles are loaned among friends or exchanged for drugs and then reported as stolen.

If someone’s car simply disappears, it obviously was stolen, he said. But if the owner loaned the car and now wants it back, the situation is not so clear-cut, and there may be delays in getting the car on the stolen-vehicle list, he said.

Even though her wrangling with law enforcement authorities appears to be over, Luipage is still without a car, which she said she needs as she looks for work.

However, even if the Prelude--California license plate 2VAW330--should turn up, she worries about whether she could keep it because she is a year behind in the payments.

Meanwhile, the episode with the ex-boyfriend is beginning to seem like just another piece of bad luck for Luipage, who said she has gone through the death of a child, a messy divorce, unemployment and even a brief spate of homelessness.

“My life is like a soap opera,” she said. “It’s unbelievable.”