Son Reunited with His Mother 21 Years After He Was Abducted by His Father
Steven Hernandez grew up in Mexico without knowing that he was abducted from his California home as an 18-month-old toddler.
He did not know that he had a mother who was alive and desperately searching for him.
All Hernandez knew of his mother was a single detail that his father, Valentin Hernandez, offered: Steven’s mother chose to abandon her family when Steven was a baby.
At the time of the 1995 abduction, Maria Mancia lived in Rancho Cucamonga, California, with her baby boy, just 18 months old, and her boyfriend, Valentin Hernandez, according to the San Bernardino Sun.
To her shock and horror, Mancia returned home one day to find the place ransacked. There was no sign of Hernandez or baby Steven.
At first, Mancia thought their home had been robbed. But once she realized that Hernandez’s personal belongings, including all of Steven’s identifying paperwork and photographs were missing, she realized that Hernandez had intentionally taken Steven and ran.
She reported her son as missing, believing that Hernandez had fled to somewhere in Mexico. She desperately called Hernandez’s family members, pleading with them for information on their whereabouts, but nobody would help.
For years, Mancia clung to the only photo she had of her son, a black and white, grainy image of Steven that she obtained from relatives in El Salvador.
“It’s all I had of him,” Mancia told the San Bernardino Sun. “It was always with me.”
But in the summer of 2016, Mancia’s questions about what happened to her son were finally answered.
“Some detectives came to my house, and at first I was scared because I didn’t know what was going on, but then they told me they found him. They found Steven,” Mancia told the San Bernardino Sun.
She learned that her son had been located alive and well in Puebla, Mexico. Investigators from the San Bernardino District Attorney’s Office had positively matched Steven’s DNA to hers.
Steven’s cold case had new life breathed into it when county authorities received a tip that Hernandez had vanished and was presumed dead in Mexico.
Senior Investigator Karen Cragg with the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Child Abduction Unit used Hernandez’s disappearance as a way to approach the unsuspecting Steven Hernandez without raising anybody’s hopes that he might be Mancia’s biological son.
“We didn’t want him to know what was going on,” Cragg told The Associated Press, reported by NPR.
“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 Hernandez willingly submitted to DNA testing, believing it would help authorities track down his missing father.
Instead, he soon received a call from the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office with information that his mother was alive in California, their DNA linking them together as mother and son.
“It was a shock,” Steven told the Sun. “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.”
Mother and son were reunited in San Bernardino in June 2016, looking into one another’s faces for the first time in 20 years.
Steven gently wiped tears out of his mother’s eyes, a face he had long forgotten.
“Now this anguish I’ve carried is gone now that I have my son back,” Mancia said. “I spent 21 years looking for him not knowing anything.”
Steven told his mother that he had brought some photos with him, photos she could add to her lone collection of one.
An American citizen, Steven said he planned to stay in the United States and enroll in a law degree program.
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