Woman Found Alive 10 Years After Being Kidnapped by Mom's Boyfriend

A 25-year-old California woman has been reunited with her mother after a decade of being held captive by the mother’s former boyfriend. Her mother had thought the two had run away together.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Silvia Suarez was involved in a live-in relationship with Isidro Garcia in Santa Ana, California in 2004 when she began suspecting that her boyfriend and 15-year-old daughter were sexually involved. She told neighbors she thought they planned to run away together. But, according to the victim, that’s not what happened.

The victim, now 25, revealed to authorities Tuesday how she allegedly was abducted in June 2004, when she was living with her mother and sisters in Santa Ana.

The victim told detectives that Garcia began sexually assaulting her. In August 2004, after Garcia assaulted her mother, Garcia drugged the girl and drove her to a house in Compton, police said.

Once there, Garcia provided the girl with fake identity documents and locked her overnight in a garage to prevent her from fleeing, police said.

He allegedly warned the victim that her family had given up looking for her and that if she tried to go back to them, the family would be deported.

The two moved around to evade capture and earned money working nights for a custodial service. The victim told police that Garcia would routinely physically abuse and rape her, and in 2012, she gave birth to a child.

The most depressing aspect of stories like this (which are a cornucopia of depressing elements) — and Jaycee Dugard and Elizabeth Smart and the women kidnapped by Ariel Castro — is the thought that if these are the cases authorities are discovering and these are survivors who are escaping, there must be other undiscovered captives living in unthinkable conditions, held by unfathomably evil people. Where are they? Who are they? What happens if they never escape?