21 Years After His Kidnapping, a Son Finally Got to Meet His Mother

In 1995, Steve Hernandez was abducted by his father, Valentin, and taken across the border to Mexico when he was just 18 months old. After 21 agonizing years, he was finally reunited with his mother, Maria Mancia, thanks to years of searching and a DNA test.

When Valentin took Steve, he also took all photos of him, plus all his paperwork and even an ultrasound image. Maria had to write a letter to her aunt in El Salvador to even get a photo of him. "The couple was having problems in their relationship at the time of Steve's abduction," senior investigator Karen Cragg said in a statement. "The mother went to work one day, only to return home to an empty residence with the father and child gone."

Authorities searched for Steve for years and eventually came to believe that Valentin had died, though it's unclear, so he still has a $750,000 warrant for his arrest. But this February, they got a tip that Steve was living in Puebla, Mexico. Investigators tricked him into thinking they were looking into his father's disappearance, but then slipped that he was similar to a boy who went missing in 1995.

They worked with the Mexican government to get DNA samples sent to a lab, and by the end of May, it was clear the two were mother and son. "She had never given up after all these years, but had accepted the fact that she may never know her son," Cragg said. "To be able to return him to his country and his mother is an indescribable honor." 

According to KABC-TV, Steve had thought his mother was dead. "I lived all these years without my mother, then to find out she's alive in another country, it was emotional," he told the TV station. He also has three siblings he never knew about. Steve, who is a U.S. citizen, does not want to return to Mexico and hopes to enroll in law school in the States.