Calif. mother finds abducted daughter on Facebook

[June 10, 2010]  MONTCLAIR, Calif. (AP) -- Prince Sagala desperately searched for her son and daughter for 15 years, fearing she had lost them forever to the estranged husband who took them to his native Mexico.

Her fears were replaced by joy when she typed her daughter's name into Facebook on a library computer and discovered that her children, now 16 and 17, were safe and with their father. She soon learned they were living near Disney World in Florida.

But in a span of days, a mother eagerly hoping for a happy reunion realized another nightmare was just beginning: They didn't want her. And for her children, their father was suddenly in jail and their life outside Orlando was turned upside down.

"She thought I was a stranger woman," Sagala said, with hurt and frustration in her voice. "I wrote back and she deleted it. Then, she disappeared."

Authorities tracked down the children and arrested their father, Faustino Fernandez Utrera, 42, on kidnapping and child custody charges on May 26. Sagala is now racing to regain custody of her children before they turn 18 and she loses them to adulthood.

Florida authorities have temporarily placed the children with a non-relative whom the pair know and set a hearing for later this month.

"This has been so traumatic for them. 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," Montclair police Detective Debbie Camou said.

"You can't fault them for what they feel," she said.

Utrera did not respond to a request for a jailhouse interview. Florida authorities did not know if he had retained an attorney.

As he fights extradition to California, authorities on Wednesday detailed the couple's marital problems, Sagala's attempts to reach her children and how she and authorities used Facebook to achieve what experts say was a rare success in the search for missing kids online.

The couple was contemplating divorce in 1995 when Sagala returned from work to find the children, then 3 and 2, gone, Camou said.

Sagala, 43, later learned through his relatives in Mexico City that her husband was there with the children and didn't intend to come back, Camou said. "At that time, she was afraid to go to Mexico because he had threatened her," she said.

Police eventually referred the investigation to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office, following the department's policy, but the probe stalled. Police followed up with Sagala three times in the intervening years.

During this time, authorities recently learned, Utrera moved to Florida with his children and got a driver's license using a fake name. It's unclear how long the three had been in Florida when Sagala found the Facebook page.

Meanwhile, Sagala raised two younger children she had with a man she said she married three years after Utrera fled and with whom she now lives on a quiet residential street in this city about 35 miles east of Los Angeles. It's not clear if she ever divorced Utrera.

But she always hoped to reunite with her older children. On a visit to a neighborhood library in March, Sagala had one of her children enter her daughter's name into Facebook and her page popped up.

On March 10, she began exchanging e-mails and chatting with her daughter, and hoped to get her to reveal where she lived and re-establish a bond.

Sagala said she sent an old family photo to the teen, but her daughter broke it off, saying in an e-mail that she was happy with her family and that she'd heard bad things about her.

Sagala alerted police, who used the names of friends on the daughter's page to track the girl to central Florida -- and her high school. Sagala gave police copies of e-mails she exchanged with her daughter, which helped prosecutors build their case against Utrera.

Authorities in Florida began surveillance of the children and Utrera to make sure they did not run off while prosecutors in San Bernardino were checking whether Utrera had filed for divorce or did anything to make a legal claim on the custody of the children in another state, Camou said.

Investigators checked the children's attendance at school and drove by their house to make sure they weren't packing up, she said. Utrera and the children had been living with another woman whom the children apparently considered a mother figure, said Kurt Rowley, who is prosecuting the case in California.

Once prosecutors said they had enough to charge Utrera, Florida deputies arrested him as he waited at a bus stop to bring his son from school. The Florida attorney handling Sagala's custody case did not return repeated calls for comment.

When Utrera was arrested, the family was living in a permanent mobile home on a palm-lined street of neatly trimmed lawns in Davenport, Fla. On a recent day, a minivan parked in the drive bore a specialty license plate with the words "Parents Make A Difference" inscribed on it.

The case is "more heartbreaking because now, with the dad in jail, she does have a right of custody by default, but it's not that simple," Rowley said, adding that courts give weight to the children's opinions because of their age. "If they were returned to her, in all likelihood, they would probably run away."

Even with the array of websites frequented by teens, discoveries like Sagala's are rare because abducted children's lives are so closely monitored by the offending parent that they can't easily get online, said Robert Lowery of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

"These children were gone for 15 years, so you have to believe that the offending parent here probably let his guard down," he said.

For now, Sagala is trying to sort out the pieces of her children's past. Her younger kids, she said, helped her stay strong.

Then, with a sad smile, she summed up what she's missed with the older ones: "Every single day."

[Associated Press; By GILLIAN FLACCUS]

Antonio Gonzalez in Davenport, Fla., contributed to this report.

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