SAN BERNARDINO -- A woman who thought she would never see her children again has found them thanks to Facebook.
The social networking web site helped Prince Sagala of San Bernardino find her kidnapped children in Central Florida.
Investigators said the woman's husband Faustino Utrera abducted the children in 1995 when they were two and three years old from San Bernadino.
According to reports he called the children's mother and told her he had taken the children to Mexico and she would never see them again.
In March, the mother logged on to Facebook and typed in her missing children's names.
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 off contact, saying in an e-mail that she was happy with her family and that she'd heard bad things about her mother.
Sagala contacted authorities, who tracked down the children, now 16 and 17, outside Orlando, Florida, and arrested their father, Faustino Fernandez Utrera, 42, on May 26.
Utrera is charged with kidnapping and violating child custody orders.
Salaga may have found her children, but so far there is no happy ending.
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."
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," prosecutor Kurt 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.
For now, Sagala is trying to sort out the pieces of her children's past.
The social networking web site helped Prince Sagala of San Bernardino find her kidnapped children in Central Florida.
Investigators said the woman's husband Faustino Utrera abducted the children in 1995 when they were two and three years old from San Bernadino.
According to reports he called the children's mother and told her he had taken the children to Mexico and she would never see them again.
In March, the mother logged on to Facebook and typed in her missing children's names.
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 off contact, saying in an e-mail that she was happy with her family and that she'd heard bad things about her mother.
Sagala contacted authorities, who tracked down the children, now 16 and 17, outside Orlando, Florida, and arrested their father, Faustino Fernandez Utrera, 42, on May 26.
Utrera is charged with kidnapping and violating child custody orders.
Salaga may have found her children, but so far there is no happy ending.
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."
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," prosecutor Kurt 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.
For now, Sagala is trying to sort out the pieces of her children's past.
