It’s a mother’s nightmare. She returns home one day and finds no trace of her only child, and the apartment she shares with the 18-month-old boy’s father is ransacked. There are no baby clothes, no papers, no photographs, not even an ultrasound image of her son, Steve.
It was in 1995 when Steve Hernandez was abducted by his own father, Valentin Hernandez, while his mother, Maria Mancia, was not at home.
“The couple was having problems in their relationship at the time of Steve’s abduction,” said Senior Investigator Karen Cragg in a statement. “The mother went to work one day, only to return home to an empty residence with the father and child gone.”
Mancia never lose hope and kept going to the police, but the case eventually went cold. It was turned over to the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Child Abduction Unit in 2012.
But on Thursday, Mancia was reunited more than two decades later with Steve, now 22, after he was taken across the U.S.-Mexico border by investigators with the San Bernardino County district attorney’s office.
“Now this anguish I’ve carried is gone now that I have my son back. I spent 21 years looking for him not knowing anything,” Mancia said.
Mancia kept going to the police, but the case eventually went cold. It was turned over to the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Child Abduction Unit in 2012.
Investigators had received a tip in February that led them to Steve, who is now living in Puebla, Mexico, and is a law student. His father, Valentin Hernandez himself disappeared and likely died. Authorities have not been able to confirm his death.
A DNA sample from Steve in Puebla and Mancia in California verified that he was in fact the missing boy.
“Maria never gave up, and neither did our office,” said Cragg. “To be able to return him to his country and his mother is an indescribable honor.”
When speaking with him, they found out that his account of his past overlapped with the missing child’s case. Steve told them he knew that he was abducted, but he thought that he was abandoned by his mother, Cragg said.
“I lived all these years without my mother, then to find out she’s alive in another country, it was emotional,” Steve said.
Steve, a U.S. citizen, also has four other siblings and doesn’t have any plans of going back to Mexico.
Watch it here: MissingKidsRescuedKids/Youtube
Sources: OpposingViews, KABC, AP via Fox News, KABC via YouTube