With most missing child cases resolved within a few hours, it's rare for kidnapped children to be found after many years. 22-year-old Steve Hernandez is an exception to that rule. On Thursday, Hernandez reunited with his mother Maria Mancia after 21 years missing, the San Bernardino County District Attorney's Office confirmed to Complex.
Mancia returned from work in 1995 to her home in Rancho Cucamonga, California to find her husband and 18-month-old son missing. All photographs, documents, and other evidence of Hernandez's existence were gone. Mancia obtained a photograph of him from her aunt, but police had no success finding him. In 2012, the case was brought to the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Child Abduction Unit, which attempted to track him down using that one picture.
The Child Abduction Unit got a tip in February that Hernandez was in Puebla, Mexico. The story he told lined up with the information Mancia had provided, and DNA tests from him and his mother confirmed he was the person they were searching for. Mancia and Hernandez reunited at the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office Thursday morning.
Steve Hernandez's father, Valentin Hernandez, had kidnapped him during a parental dispute. The Child Abduction Unit's sources believe Valentin is dead, though his death has yet to be confirmed, which means he has a $750,000 warrant for kidnapping and abduction.
"Now this anguish I've carried is gone now that I have my son back," Mancia told ABC. "I spent 21 years looking for him not knowing anything." Hernandez, who plans to stay in the U.S. and go to law school, echoed her sentiment: "I lived all these years without my mother, then to find out she's alive in another country, it was emotional."
