lpetrich
Contributor
Two decades after vanishing, her daughter suddenly showed up with children, a new identity — and speaking Spanish - Chicago Tribune
Cynthia Haag remembers Crystal as a happy child who got along very well with others and who liked school.Twenty years, 10 months and two weeks after her daughter vanished, Cynthia Haag was inside the row house she refused to abandon - lest her missing child come back - when her phone started to ring. Her other daughter was on the line, saying she'd just gotten an unexpected message on Facebook.
It was from Crystal. The long-lost child.
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Her hair was now short. She spoke Spanish somehow. And she was no longer Crystal Haag, who would have been 35, but had adopted the alias of Crystal Saunders, who was 44. In that moment, however, none of those changes mattered.
"Still my pretty girl," Cynthia said, hugging her.
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Between 2011 and 2016, only 56 children were gone longer than 20 years and returned, according to a report by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
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The majority of kids who go missing are runaways like her son. But not all who vanish had behavioral issues. Some simply disappear without their family having any indication of why. Some are like Crystal.
Crystal remembers those years differently than her mother. She said she barely got along with her siblings. She said she sneaked out all of the time. And she said she was not the happy kid her mother recalled. In fact, she was so miserable and so scared that the only plan that made sense to her was to escape.
When she was 9, she recalled, a neighbor began sexually assaulting her, and for the next few years, it happened so much that it seemed to be almost normal. She never told anyone about it, but when she became a teenager, she began to suspect there wasn't anything normal about it. The abuse by then had gone on for so long that, she said, she'd begun to think her mother had to have known - a suspicion that solidified into belief. Her mother called it ridiculous and untrue. "What kind of mother would do that?" Cynthia said.