Hispanic Mother Reunites With Her Kidnapped Son 18 Years Ago

2024 Author: Steven Freeman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 08:15

A Hispanic mother experienced an emotional encounter with her son this Thursday, who was taken from her 21 years ago by her ex-partner and the boy's father.

María Mancia had not seen her son since 1995, when her husband and father of the then baby took the little boy when he was only 18 months old. After arriving from work, the woman only found a photograph as a souvenir. That snapshot was the tool she used to search by sky, sea, and land for her son.

The boy, who is now a man and his name is Steve Hernández, was found safe and sound in the state of Puebla, Mexico, after an exhaustive investigation that culminated in the boy's return to the United States to reunite with his mother.

"Now, this anguish that I have carried is gone, now that I have my son," the woman said tearfully to the KABC-TV television station in Los Angeles. "I spent 21 years looking for him without knowing anything [about him]."

The San Bernardino County, California Sheriff's Office was in charge of searching for the child for years, but it was not until last February that they received a solid lead to locate him.

Investigator Karen Cragg said that when they finally located Hernandez, they had to approach him very carefully. "We had to resort to a ruse to contact him," the agent told the AP agency. “We told him that we were investigating his father and that we needed DNA to be able to locate him. We didn't want to scare him. We didn't really know what the situation was like there. We had to be careful."

Once the tests were taken, pressure was exerted to get the results quickly. When they returned positive and called the mother to give her the incredible news, she was shocked. "It was like she didn't believe us at first," Cragg said. "First she started crying. She said she couldn't believe she was still alive."

The boy lived all these years without knowing his origin. According to some media, he did not have any personal documents, as his mother had them, including his birth certificate.

"I have lived all these years without my mother, to later find that she was alive in another country, it is very emotional," the boy told KABC.

Hernández, who is a U. S. citizen according to the New York Post, plans to stay with his mother in California and continue law studies that he had already begun in Mexico. So they can rewrite their story.