SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. (AP) — A California mother has met her abducted son for the first time in over 20 years.
Maria Mancia hadn’t seen her son since her husband took him in 1995, when he was 18 months old. The boy, Steve Hernandez, now a man of about 22, has been found in Mexico. On Thursday he was brought to the U.S. to meet his mother.
The San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Child Abduction Unit had been looking for Hernandez for years, and received a recent tip that he was in Mexico. The father is missing and presumed dead.
Authorities interviewed the boy and took a DNA swab. The facts of his life, and the DNA, matched.
In a photo of the reunion, Hernandez can be seen wiping a tear from his mother’s eye.
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