Mother, son reunited after 23 years
Published: March 28, 2006
A California woman has been reunited with a son who vanished in South America 23 years ago.
Terri Helkenn searched for her son, making a two-week trip to Uruguay and Brazil in 1985 to check jails and hospitals. After she returned to California, she and her husband moved to the Philippines for a while, and when her son John Humbard returned to San Diego later that year he found his family gone.
Humbard returned to Buenos Aires and married a woman he had been dating. Two decades later, at his wife’s urging, he decided to locate his mother and took a step that had not been possible in 1985 — doing a Google search. He found an interview in the Tri-Valley Herald, a Bay Area newspaper, about how much she hoped her son would turn up.
Helkenn said she made up her mind long ago that if her son turned up she would not be angry.
“Never underestimate a young person’s capacity to justify their actions and rationalize their decisions,” Humbard, now 43, told The Argus, a sister paper of the Herald. “Events sweep you up. I got married. I had kids. There are a lot of whys behind this.”
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