By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
A California woman whose estranged husband took her son and daughter to Mexico 15 years ago was using a library computer when she typed her daughter’s name into Facebook and found the teen who said she was living with her father near Orlando, Florida.
The Palm Beach Post is reporting that the children’s mother, Prince Sagala, 43, not only located her daughter on the social networking site but actually conducted an on-line conversation with her long enough to discover where the child was now living.
Authorities were able to track the children, now 16 and 17, to a home outside Orlando, Florida, where they arrested their father, 42 year-old Faustino Fernandez Utrera. He faces kidnapping and child custody charges.
The children have been placed in temporary custody with a friend of the family pending a hearing set for later this month.
“This has been so traumatic for them,” Detective Debbie Camou told the Post. “The father, the only person they’ve known as a parent, is now in jail. When they have children of their own, when they’re 25, 26, 27 years of age, it’s going to dawn on them what their mother lost. You can’t fault them for what they feel.”
According to Camou, the couple had been contemplating divorce in 1995 when Sagala came home from work one day to find the children, then aged three and two, gone. She learned through her husband’s relatives in Mexico City that he was there with the children and didn’t intend to come back.
“At that time, she was afraid to go to Mexico because he had threatened her,” Camou said.
Sagala married another man three later with whom she had two children; but she always hoped to reunite with her lost son and daughter.
After discovering her daughter on Facebook on March 10, she began exchanging e-mails with her and even sent the teen an old family photo. But the girl eventually broke off the discussion, saying she was happy with her family and that she’d heard bad things about her mother.
Sagala then alerted police, who were able to track the girl to central Florida through the name of the high school and the friends listed on her Facebook page.
In spite of what she describes as a not-so-happy reunion with her children, Sagala is determined to regain custody of the children before they turn 18.
Kurt Rowley, who is prosecuting the case in California, says regaining custody will be complicated. “ . . .(W)ith the dad in jail, she does have a right of custody by default, but it’s not that simple. If they were returned to her, in all likelihood, they would probably run away.”
Discoveries like Sagala’s are rare, experts say, because the offending parents usually monitor their children’s online activity so closely they would never be able to join a networking site such as Facebook.
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