Long-lost child returns with a new identity

[lpetrich]

Two decades after vanishing, her daughter suddenly showed up with children, a new identity — and speaking Spanish - Chicago Tribune

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.

...
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.

...
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.

...
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.

Cynthia Haag remembers Crystal as a happy child who got along very well with others and who liked school.

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.

 

[lpetrich]

But in 1997, Crystal ran away from home, taking a bus to New York City. She slept outdoors the first few nights, then in Upper Manhattan, she introduced her new identity, Crystal Saunders, age 23 -- 9 years older than her real age at the time, 14.

Soon she was cleaning houses and apartments, living in a heavily Dominican neighborhood, pregnant with her first child by a local man and equipped with a fake drivers' license. Later, she said, she even acquired a Medicaid card, which for pregnant women in New York City is relatively easy to obtain without official documentation.

Her new identity was easy to remember, because Crystal had changed only a few details of it. She claimed that she did not have a family, and many people seemed satisfied with that. "It's not a rare thing to not have a family," she says.

But over time, as Crystal learned fluent Spanish, birthed four children, immersed herself in the Dominican community and even adopted new relatives - people she referred to as "grandpa," "grandma" and "cousin" on social media - she didn't have to remember anymore. Her new identity had subsumed the old.

In 2014, she celebrated her 40th birthday, though she was 31 at the time.

She continued to check on the family that she had left behind.

She badly wanted to reach out to them and often thought of Cynthia. But she was terrified to contact her relatives, ashamed by what she'd put them through. Only after her son started urging her did she write her sister, Bianca. And then it all happened so fast. Bianca was coming to get her. Crystal was walking through the door of a home she'd left 21 years ago. And Cynthia was so overjoyed to see her - even asking Crystal to sleep in her bed that night - that Crystal decided to stay.

But Crystal complained that Cynthia treated her like a child.

But in addition to that, Cynthia had to know why she had left for so long. Crystal, after equivocating for months, finally came out with it. She'd been raped continously as a child. And she'd thought that Cynthia had known.

 

[aupmanyav]

A sad story but at least it has an ending of sorts. In India millions of children disappear. Sometimes the boys are maimed to beg or girls thrown into brothels. May Allah preserve the children and their happiness.