Two decades after his disappearance, his daughter was suddenly found with children, a new identity – and spoke Spanish

BALTIMORE – Twenty years, ten months and two weeks after the disappearance of his daughter, Cynthia Haag was in the townhouse that she had refused to give up – lest her missing child come back – when her phone started ringing. Her other daughter was on the phone, saying that she had just received an unexpected message on Facebook

. She came from Crystal. The child lost a long time.

Haag prepared for another disappointment. But when she saw the Facebook profile picture later in the March day of last year, she was immediately aware. Even white and straight teeth. The same crumpled eyes. Even bright smile. The girl she had last seen while she was 14 years old: now a mature adult.

The questions began to rock in his mind. Why did Crystal leave? Where was she? Why did she come back?

In the space of half an hour, Bianca Davis, Haag's eldest daughter, was in the car and was heading north to New York, where Crystal was living north of Harlem. Late in the night, after the news spread throughout West Baltimore and the house filled with people, Crystal finally appeared.

Her hair was now short. She spoke Spanish one way or another. And it was no longer Crystal Haag, who would have been 35, but adopted the pseudonym Crystal Saunders, who was 44 years old. However, none of these changes mattered.

"Still my pretty girl," Cynthia said, hugging her.

Her missing daughter was finally home, but the difficult part was just beginning.

About half a million children are missing each year, the vast majority of whom are found or returned. However, for a few, it can take months to find their family, and for a few more, it can take up to a year or two. But it is extremely rare that a missing child who eventually returns is missing as long as Crystal. According to a report from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, only 56 children have been away for more than 20 years, between 2011 and 2016.

There is a conventional story about how these meetings unfold – with tears, hugs and the promise of a new and happier start. "The end of the fairy tale," said Meaghan Good, curator of The Charley Project, a database of long-term missing persons. But in many cases, say the experts, the situation is much more complicated.

"It's not as simple as finding your life and starting your life again," said Robert Lowery, head of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, who revised his publication. report on missing children in the long term. "Both sides feel compelled to reconcile, but it takes a lot of time, patience and understanding."

The more a person is gone, the more difficult it can become.

Lori Peterson, 60, a mother from Colorado Springs, Colorado, learned this ten years ago when her son, Derek, reappeared after four years. A troubled teenager who ran away from a residential treatment center at the age of 16, he had spent most of the four years homeless or living on the other side of the house. country, North Carolina. Meanwhile, in Colorado Springs, Peterson has deteriorated. Convinced that he was dead, the family started doing DNA tests to see if it matched a corpse. "I cried every day on the way to work, and then all the way home," she said.

Then, for it to come back suddenly after all that they lived after a candle service. finally put him to rest? It was at first difficult to forgive him. And in some ways, the damage was irreversible. "It's not really a mother-son relationship," said Peterson about his connection to his son. "These past years of his adolescence to those of a man have failed me, and there are things I do not know about him."

The majority of missing children are runaways like his son. But all those who disappeared had no behavioral problems. Some simply disappear without their family knowing why. Some are like Crystal.

It was April 26, 1997, a Saturday. Cynthia worked as a cashier at the local grocery store. At the time, she did not earn much, just a few dollars an hour, but she was proud that the food was always on the table and her children had clean clothes. She was busy working and educating all the time, but she was there as a single mother.

That morning, she looked up at work to see Crystal, her fourth child, 14, smiling as usual. Cynthia knew her as an explosion of light – a "sweet girl" who won a fifth grade award for always complimenting others, who loved school and who got along well with everyone, comrades clbad and three siblings included.

Crystal has had some. milk and cereals, and came to his mother. "Stay home today," recalls Cynthia, and her daughter said that she would do it. It was the last time she had seen her for 21 years. A few hours after Cynthia returned home and found that Crystal was gone, she called friends, relatives, anyone who knew where Crystal was before contacting the police. His mind ran through possibilities. Had she been kidnapped? Has she escaped? She refused – at some point and later – to think that her daughter had been killed or had died in one way or another.

From that moment, she looked for Crystal in front of each dark-haired girl. One day, she was walking down Baltimore Street at the back of a cab and thought she saw her outside one of the clubs, on the sidewalk, but by the time she ran, the girl was gone. Another time, she was there again, this time at the back of a bus going away to find out where.

"She always wore a baseball cap," Cynthia said. But this index was not enough to find it. Cynthia stopped celebrating Christmas – it sounded unnatural without Crystal – and years have pbaded. Intermittent police reports from Baltimore traced the pbading time:

April 29, 1997: "Crystal Haag did not return."

Aug. December 19, 1999: "The investigation continues".

May 3, 2006: "Crystal's file is still open."

Sept. 20, 2010: "All efforts to locate [her] have been exhausted."

Crystal remembers these years differently from her mother. She said that she was barely listening with her siblings. She said that she was sneaking all the time. And she said that she was not the happy child that her mother remembered. In fact, she was so unhappy and so scared that the only plan that seemed logical to her was to escape.

At age 9, she recalls, a neighbor began to badually badault her and, in the next few years, it happened. so much that it seemed almost normal. She never talked to anyone about it, but when she became a teenager, she began to think that there was nothing normal about it. The abuse had lasted so long that, she said, she had begun to think that her mother had to know it – a suspicion that reinforced her conviction. His mother called it ridiculous and false. "What kind of mother would do that?" Cynthia said.

After taking her milk and cereals to the grocery store this Saturday-Spring 1997, Crystal did not stay home as requested by her mother. She went to spend hours with her friends. She knew that her mother would be crazy and decided to stay outside for longer. "And then he was 12 [a.m.] and I did not go back," she said.

She boarded a bus to New York, remembering walking in the streets of the city at dawn, seeing Statue. of Liberty license plates. She had nothing to do with her, but remembers feeling little fear. On the first nights she slept outside, homeless, until she went to Upper Manhattan, where she introduced the world to a new person: Crystal Saunders, a 23-year-old woman, well that she does not remember anymore why chooses this name.

Soon, she cleaned houses and apartments, residing in a very Dominican neighborhood, pregnant with her first child of a local man and carrying a fake driver's license. Later, she would have even acquired a Medicaid card, which is relatively easy to obtain for pregnant women in New York without an official document.

The new identity was first easy to remember, she said, because she had changed only small details. The last name. Age – credible because she looked so much older than she was. As for his family? She told people that she did not, and often they did not insist on the issue. "It's not uncommon to have no family," she said.

But over time, Crystal learned Spanish fluently, gave birth to four children, immersed herself in the Dominican community, and even adopted new parents – people who were not married. she named them "grandfather", "grandmother" and "cousin" on social media – she no longer had to remember it. His new identity had subsumed the old.

On January 29, 2014, while Crystal was 31 years old, she posted an image on Instagram. This showed her holding a birthday cake. "Happy 40th to me !!!!!!" Crystal writes, who was then working in the food industry.

"We have seen this before," said Lowery of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. "Some of these kids do not want to be found and badume new identities."

In the National Archives database, 45-year-old Crystal Marie Saunders is a fully realized person, with a list of York addresses a $ 1,282 lien against her in 2010 as well as a statement of guilt for crime of criminal sale of a controlled substance. But for Crystal Marie Haag: nothing

When her eldest son, Bryan, 20, reached the end of his teenage years, he started asking questions. Where was his family? Everyone has at least family, he said. At first, she did not tell her what she had been doing regularly since Facebook's creation: she was sneaking up on her family in Baltimore.

She wanted to contact him and often thought about Cynthia. But she was terrified of contacting her relatives, ashamed of what she had done to them. It's only after her son started pressing her that she wrote her sister, Bianca. And then everything happened so fast. Bianca came looking for her. Crystal was walking through the door of a house that she had left 21 years ago. And Cynthia was so happy to see her – even asking Crystal to sleep in her bed that night – that Crystal decided to stay.

The joy of the meeting, however, soon gave way to uncertainty, even resentment.

Crystal: "She treats me like a child … but I have children myself."

Cynthia: "It's like meeting a new person – she leaves as a child and returns to adulthood."

Crystal: "It's been very difficult, and sometimes it's easier to stay away."

Cynthia: "I just want to love him."

But on top of that, Cynthia had to know why she was gone for. So long. Crystal, after spending at least the equivalent of several months, finally came out. She had been raped continuously as a child. And she thought Cynthia knew about it.

Cynthia says she's shocked. She said that she had no idea what had happened, but no matter how many times she said it, Crystal said that she did not know what had happened. Was still not sure whether it was the truth. She loves her mother – that's why she came home, why she's been asking about her for so many years – but there are so many problems hanging over their relationship, which seems sometimes stuck.

Yet, the two continue to try, over the months. In 2018, she turns to 2019. Crystal currently lives with an aunt in the same neighborhood and often sees her mother with disabilities. They are in life one of the other, each desiring more. "I just wish we were a little closer," said Cynthia, now 61 years old.

But it's a beginning. Cynthia will finally leave the house where she refused to leave all these years.

"In the coming year," she said. "I'm gone, it's time to go."