BEDFORD, Texas — Twenty-year-old Stephen Michael Palacios came across a newspaper story recently about a boy allegedly abducted by his father in 1993. Palacios, it turns out, was that boy.
After learning about his past, Palacios persuaded his father to turn himself in — even accompanying him to a lawyer’s office this week — and will soon be reunited with the mother who desperately searched for him for 17 years.
“I am so excited,” his mother, Dee Ann Adams, 40, told the Waco Tribune-Herald. “I’m really not even sure how I feel right now. It has been such a long time, and I had to move on. I had other kids I had to take care of. I am happy, and I am hoping we can rebuild our relationship, but the main thing is that I am in shock right now.”
Palacios could not be located for comment Friday.
He was 3 when he disappeared after a visit with his father, Stephen Palacios Jr., a high school Latin teacher and basketball coach in Waco who had been granted visitation rights after the couple’s divorce. A warrant for the father’s arrest was issued, and over the years detectives chased several leads.
Then the grown-up son saw an Aug. 29 article in the Waco newspaper about the alleged abduction, according to his mother. In the story, police asked for the public’s help in solving the case. The article included a photo of Palacios as a toddler.
“I was told that Stephen Michael somehow saw the article in your newspaper and told his dad that he wanted to meet his mom,” his mother told the newspaper.
