Mother Finds Lost Son on Facebook

Lorena Perez, Joseph Vaquera, and their one-year-old son, Isaiah, lived in San Antonio in 2006 but the couple's relationship was falling apart.  One day, Perez came home to find that Vaquera had vanished with Isaiah.  Because there was no custody order, authorities could not charge Vaquera with a crime.  Lorena Perez had not seen her son in four years... until someone found a photo of him on Facebook and contacted authorities.

Perez positively identified her son, who had been living with Joseph Paquera's mother while Paquera was in prison.  Lorena Perez and Isaiah were reunited earlier this month.  The boy's 54-year-old paternal grandmother, Perez' former mother-in-law, has been charged with kidnapping and tampering with government records (she falsified Isaiah's birth certificate to enroll him in school and refused to turn him over to his mother).

In May, Floridian, Prince Sagala, searched for her child on Facebook.  Both of her children disappeared 15 years earlier, when Sagala's estranged husband absconded with them and fled to Mexico.  Sagala was shocked to find her daughter, now 17, on the social network, and the two began communicating online.  Using the information Sagala got from Facebook and her daughter, authorities tracked down the children outside of Orlando, FL, and arrested their 42-year-old father on kidnapping and child custody charges.

© C Harris Lynn, 2010