Mother Reunites With Son 35 Years After His Abduction (+video)

Photo Credit: Kathy AmayaA Wisconsin mother whose 2-year-old son was abducted by her estranged husband 35 years ago recently received a life-changing phone call with the news she’d been waiting to hear for decades: Her son had been found.

In 1977, Kathy Amaya left her husband of several years and took their 1-year-old son, David, with her. She and David moved from their house in Chicago to her sister’s nearby home, and Kathy allowed her ex-husband to periodically visit the boy. The following year, when David was 2, the boy’s father picked him up so the two could spend the day together. “That was the last time I saw my son,” Amaya, now 60 and an assistant head housekeeper at a Holiday Inn Express in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, tells Yahoo Shine.

A few days later, her ex-husband called Amaya from Mexico and said he had taken David there on a one-month permit to live with his grandparents, but promised to bring the boy home after that. After the month came and went without David’s return and her ex-husband cutting off contact, she filed a police report. “The police couldn’t help because it was out of their jurisdiction,” she recounts. “It was infuriating.”

Over the next three and a half decades, Amaya tried to move on with her life, bearing four more children (three sons, now ages 34, 30, and 23; and a 25-year-old daughter) and later getting engaged. In more recent years, she began searching for David online. “As my other children grew older, I explained that they also had a brother who was taken by my ex-husband,” says Amaya. “I couldn’t hide the truth from them.”

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