Age-processed images helped locate the missing woman
Kids are always popping up in the most random places, but the father of a missing woman might well have given up hope on seeing her again nearly 30 years on from her kidnapping.
Andrea Michelle Reyes was less than two years old when she was taken from her home in New Haven, Connecticut in October 1999, but she has now been discovered alive and well in Mexico 26 years later.
It’s been a good week for finding missing kids, after Abdul Aziz Khan was discovered 1,500 miles away from his home at the age of 14, seven years after being seized by his estranged mother.
Andrea’s case has taken far longer to solve, with modern technology playing a huge part in identifying the woman, who is now 27 years old.
At the time of her kidnapping, it was thought that her mother Rosa Tenorio, who did not have primary custody of her, took her across the border to Mexico.
Despite desperate searches from Andrea’s father and her other family members, she was sadly never located.
That is until recently, when police in New Haven decided to reopen the cold case, using several age-progressed images from the FBI of her from over the last 26 years to try and predict how she might look.
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While this technology can never be trusted completely, as for all we know Andrea might have shaved her head and gone for a full facial tattoo, it clearly did the trick in this case.
Thanks to the power of social media, search warrants and old interviews, Andrea has now been found after putting her name forward.
She agreed to provide a DNA sample which confirmed a father/daughter relationship, proving that the woman who reached out is, in fact, the toddler kidnapped nearly three decades ago.
Surprisingly, this perhaps isn’t the strangest way lost children have been found, with one young lad recently spotting himself on a Channel 5 TV show and speaking up after seeing the appeal.
Andrea currently resides in Mexico but it is unclear at this moment in time the relationship she has with her mother, although it might not be 100 percent rock solid given she took away any contact with her father for most of her life.
New Haven Police Chief Karl Jacobson said: “While cases may have investigative leads exhausted at the time, no cold case is ever truly closed. We remain committed to resolving every cold case and this is a perfect example of that effort.”
This certainly proves that you should never give up hope, and now the two can now get to know each other properly after being reunited.
