Watch the mother and son reuniting after 21 years:
Video Credit: Youtube/Inside Edition
A father abducted his 18-month-old son from his California home.
Steven Hernandez, who grew up in Mexico, didn’t know his father kidnapped him when he was a toddler.
He also didn’t know that he had a mother who was searching for him.
His father, Valentin Hernandez told him that his mother abandoned them when he was a baby.
In 1995, Steven’s mother, Maria Mancia lived with her boyfriend, Valentin Hernandez and 18-month-old son, Steven in Rancho Cucamonga, California.
One day when she came back home, she realized that Hernandez had kidnapped Steven as his personal belongings, Steven’s identifying paperwork and photographs were missing from the house.
She filed a complaint, contacted Hernandez’s family members, searched for him everywhere but she couldn’t find her son.
All she had with her was a black and white photo of her son, Steven.
“It’s all I had of him. It was always with me”, Mancia told the San Bernardino Sun.
In 2016, when Hernandez went missing, Senior Investigator Karen Cragg with the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Child Abduction Unit asked Steven Hernandez to submit DNA testing without telling him anything.
Cragg said: “We didn’t want him to know what was going on. We didn’t want to scare him off. We weren’t sure what the circumstances were down there. We had to tread very carefully.”
Steven thought he was being asked to submit DNA so they could locate his missing father.
Mancia was told that her son had been found in Puebla, Mexico while Steven also received a call from the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office that his mother was alive and searching for him.
Steven told the Sun: “It was a shock. I didn’t know if she was alive or not and to get a call that says they found my mother and that she had been looking for me, it was like a cold bucket of water. But it’s good. It’s good.”
In June 2016, Mancia finally reunited with her son she had been searching for 21 years in San Bernardino.
Mancia said: “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.”
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