Nothing beats the connection of a mom and her child that even after years of distance, the invisible cord would have only become sturdier. Maria Mancia of California only had an aging photo of a toddler to remember her lost son with but last Thursday, the picture turned into a grown-up man, 22-year-old Steven Hernandez.
The mother of five, Maria Mancia, couldn't believe her ears when investigators knocked on her California home and delivered the good news (via New York Daily News). The son who she had been looking for years and have managed to reconcile with the fact that they might not see each other again, is coming home after two decades of being apart.
Investigators from San Bernardino County District Attorney's Child Abduction Unit, Michelle Faxon and Karen Cragg, were able to track Maria Mancia's son in Puebla, Mexico. Using DNA and employing the help of the Department of Justice, they found the 22-year-old aspiring law student with the same background as the son Maria Mancia had lost (via San Bernardino Sun).
When the investigators saw the young lad outside a university he was enrolling at, they requested to conduct an investigation concerning his dad who was missing at that time. They did not tell Steven at first that his mom, Maria Mancia was looking for him.
“We used a ruse to contact him. We told him we were investigating his father and we needed his DNA to help locate his father. We didn’t want to scare him off. We weren’t sure what the circumstances were down there. We had to tread very carefully,” Cragg told The Associated Press as per Huffington Post.
Steven and Mancia weren't informed that the investigators planned to get a DNA test. Upon obtaining Steven's DNA sample, it was taken to the Department of Justice Lab for testing with Mancia's sample already on hand. Two weeks later, Cragg and Faxon got the results and graciously, it matched. All of a sudden, Maria Mancia has a fifth son and Steven Fernandez has a mother (via Huffington Post).
Shortly after, the mother and son met each other after 21 years at the District Attorney's Office. At first, it felt strange to warmly hug a person with a face they don't recognize at all but family would always be family and Steven Fernandez, minutes after, was already wiping the tears of his long lost mother (via San Bernardino Sun).
It was easy to take Steven Hernandez to America because he is a U.S. Citizen. Now, he plans to study law in the U.S. (via San Bernardino Sun).
21 years ago, Steven was kidnapped by his father Valentin Hernandez. Maria Mancia and Hernandez had been dealing with marital problems when one day, she comes home with her husband and their son gone. Thereafter, she called the relatives of Hernandez but they wouldn't tell her anything. Fortunately, the case landed in San Bernardino's Child Abduction Unit and now she and her son had finally reunited.
"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," Maria Mancia said as quoted by ABC 7.
