Story of an 8-year-old girl from Vallejo [music] who defied all odds by escaping a kidnapper who had already killed [music] at least two other girls.
Her name is Mity San.
Saturday morning, August 12th, 2000, Santa Clara, California.
An industrial road, loading docks, warehouses, and a little girl running.
Her name is Midsy Sanchez.
[music] She is 8 years old.
She was taken while walking home from school in Vallejo.
Now 2 days later, she is 68 [music] mi from home.
Behind her, a grown man is shouting at her to come back.
Up ahead, a truck driver has just pulled out [music] of his company yard.
His window is open.
In the next few [music] seconds, that trucker is going to hear her name, and what she tells him will hand police a license plate that [music] leads straight to a man named Curtis Dean Anderson.
For 2 days, the Vallejo police, the FBI, and volunteers [music] across the Bay Area have been searching for her.
Everything turns on this moment because Midsy was not the first little [music] girl to vanish from Vallejo.
8 months earlier, a 7-year-old named Siana Fairchild set out for school on a December morning and never came home.
And on the day Midsy ran toward that truck, nobody in Vallejo knew where Siana was.
To understand why one little girl’s escape mattered so much, we have to go back [music] first two days to a Thursday afternoon in Vallejo and a walk home on the day of her birthday [music] party.
Then 8 months to the morning Siana disappeared.
Two girls, one town, one man.
One of them could not be found.
The other one found her own way out.
Midsy’s courage has been told in pieces for years.
Here we are going to walk through all of it.
The walk home, the two days, the keys, the man in the truck, and the answers her escape finally brought to a family who had been waiting in [music] the dark.
If stories like this matter to you, stay with Midsy until the very end.
And subscribe so the next one reaches you, too.
Because the way [music] this story ends is not the way anyone in Vallejo expected.
Thursday, August 10th, 2000.
Vallejo, [music] California.
Vallejo sits on the northern edge of San Francisco [music] Bay.
A working town, Navy history, busy streets, families who have lived on the same block for decades.
[music] This is where the kidnapping of Midsy Sanchez begins.
Midsy lived on Tennessee Street with [music] her mother, her father, and four brothers and sisters.
Her father was Juan Carlos Sanchez.
[music] Her mother was Susanna Velasco.
Susanna cut hair at a super cuts [music] in town.
Most afternoons, she picked the kids up from school herself.
[music] But that Thursday, she had to work late.
So that morning, she dropped off Midsy and her 10-year-old brother at Highland Elementary School.
Highland was a year- round school.
In the middle of August, while most California kids were still enjoying the summer, Midsy was sitting in a classroom, and she could barely [music] sit still.
This was the day of her birthday party.
She had just turned 8.
She would later say she was excited all day long, and that what she really wanted was to get home and help her mom set everything up.
On days when their mother could not pick them up, Midsy and her brother walked home together.
That was [music] the rule.
But that afternoon, Midsy stayed behind to play on the playground.
A little before 3:00, she started home on her own.
It was not a long walk, about five blocks, 15 minutes at the most.
Quiet streets, tidy houses, and neighbors who had owned their homes for years.
The kind of route a parent stops worrying about.
Around 3:00, some of her classmates saw her standing beneath a stop sign at the corner of Shasta and Nebraska streets, one block from the school.
Remember that stop sign?
It is the last ordinary picture of Midsy [music] Sanchez anyone would have for 2 days.
A little farther along, almost home, Midsy noticed a man sitting alone in a parked car.
As she got [music] closer, she realized he was watching her.
Not through the windshield, through his rear view mirror.
Years later, Midsy would describe that moment in an interview.
Something [music] inside her said, “Cross the street.”
But she was eight.
She was happy.
Her party was waiting.
She kept walking.
When she came [music] alongside the car, the man got out.
He told her he had hurt his hip and could not bend down.
There was a roll of duct tape on the floor of his car.
Would she reach in and grab it for him?
Stop here for a second because this is the part every parent watching needs to hear.
He did not chase her.
He did not grab her from across the street.
He asked a little girl for help.
And she said yes because she was a kind child raised by a family that taught her to be kind.
She leaned into the car to reach the tape.
He came up behind her and covered her mouth with his hand.
[music] She tried to scream.
Nobody heard her.
Within seconds, the car was moving.
And then came a moment Midsy has never forgotten.
[clears throat] The man drove right past her house.
Her mother was inside getting ready for the party.
Midsy could see her own home through the car window.
She has said that all she could think was how badly she wanted to be inside it.
She was that close.
And then the house was behind her.
Long before that day, Susanna Velasco had taught her daughter two things.
Stay away from [music] strangers.
And if anyone ever takes you, do anything you can to get away.
On that Thursday [music] afternoon, Midsy learned how quickly the first rule can fail.
Over the next 2 days, she would hold on to the second one with everything [music] she had.
By evening, Midsy had not come home.
At first, there was a reasonable explanation to [music] check.
Midsy had been known to stop at a friend’s house without telling her parents.
[music] So, the family called around.
Investigators went to look.
M.
She was not there.
And slowly, the feeling in that house on Tennessee Street changed.
The party stopped being a party.
It became a waiting room.
By nightfall, the Vallejo police were in the neighborhood.
So was the FBI.
Officers walked the route from Highland Elementary to the Sanchez home.
[music] Blockby block, scores of neighbors came out to search alongside them.
A missing child flyer went out.
Midsy Sanchez, 8 years old, 4t tall, about 80 [music] lb, last seen near Shasta and Nebraska streets just a few blocks from home.
One member of Midsy’s family put it to reporters in a single sentence.
She went to school, but she never came back.
Think about how that lands for a parent, not a runaway teenager, not a stranger on the news, an 8-year-old who walked out of her school on a sunny afternoon, on a route her family had trusted for years and simply stopped existing.
But here is what made that night different in Vallejo.
Here is why the fear spread [music] faster than the flyers.
The people of this town had already lived through one child abduction that year, and it had never been solved.
Midsy Sanchez lived within 2 mi of where another little girl had lived.
That little [music] girl had been missing for 8 months.
To understand what Vallejo [music] was feeling that night, you have to know about her.
Her full name was Ziana Lashe Capui [music] E Fair Fairchild.
For most of her short life, Siana did not live in Vallejo at all.
She was raised [music] by her great aunt Stephanie Kahalakulu and her great grandmother, first [music] in Hawaii and later in Colorado.
Her family has said her favorite colors were purple and yellow.
In June of 1999, Aziana moved to Vallejo to live with her mother.
She was seven.
She started first grade.
6 months later, she was gone.
Thursday, December 9th, 1999.
[music] Early morning.
Siana Fairchild was supposed to be on her way to a school bus stop.
She never made it to school.
What happened between her front door and [music] that bus stop became the first great mystery of this story.
In the days after, police could not even confirm that Siana had ever reached the stop.
A week later, Vallejo officers set up checkpoints downtown and spoke with about 400 people, drivers and pedestrians, anyone who might have seen her.
They developed new leads, but they could not find a single person who remembered seeing Zeanna that morning.
A 7-year-old girl had disappeared in the middle of a busy town, and it was as if the morning had swallowed her.
Her family did not wait for answers to come [music] to them.
Stephanie Kahalikulu became the center of the search.
She helped set up a search center on Admiral Callahan Lane in Vallejo.
In the first week alone, volunteers handed out more than 150,000 flyers with Siana’s face on them.
Family flew in from [music] Hawaii, including a great uncle who joined the searchers.
Zeanna’s picture went up on billboards along California highways.
[music] Her story was featured on America’s Most Wanted.
Weeks became months.
Christmas came and Zeanna [music] did not.
The new year came, then spring, then summer.
Through all of it, Stephanie Kahalakulu kept the search alive.
She kept the flyers moving.
She kept Zeanna’s name in front of reporters.
She kept telling anyone who would listen that a little girl was still out there.
Now pause and picture where she was on August 10th, [music] 2000.
8 months into the worst year of her life, Stephanie Kahalikulu [music] turned on the news and there was another little girl’s face.
Another missing child from Vallejo.
Another walked to or from school.
Another family standing in front of cameras asking for help.
She did not know it yet.
Nobody did.
But the answer [music] to the question she had been asking for 8 months was sitting in a car somewhere in the Bay Area with a second little girl inside it.
To find that answer, someone was going to have to come back from that car.
Back to Thursday afternoon, back to Midsy.
The man did not take her far at first.
He drove across the freeway to a shopping center parking lot.
He parked in a corner away from the other cars.
Then he [music] pulled out a set of clothes and made her change into them.
It is the kind of detail that tells you something chilling [music] without anyone having to say it out loud.
This had been planned.
He covered her with a blanket and kept driving.
He told her that if she did not stay quiet, she would not live.
She believed him.
That night, [music] he pulled into the parking lot of a truck stop off Highway 80 on the outskirts of Vallejo, still close to home.
Close enough that the search for her was happening only a few miles away.
What follows is the hardest part of Midsy’s [music] story.
We are not going to describe it.
What he did to her in that car belongs to her, and she has spoken about it in her own words and in her own time.
What matters here is what she did next.
Before the night was over, the man brought out a long silver chain and a padlock.
He wrapped the chain tightly around her leg and locked it.
An 8-year-old girl chained inside a car.
Midsy has said that in that moment she believed it was over, [music] that she would never see her family again.
Now take a breath [music] and look at those same hours from the other side.
While Midsy lay chained in a car off Highway 80, her family was in the middle of the longest night of their lives.
Police went door to door.
Volunteers walked the creeks and the empty lots.
A Vallejo police lieutenant later said that in a search like that, you chase every tiny clue you can find and you still feel almost helpless.
Friday came.
The man drove Midsy around the Bay Area, chained by the leg.
He hung blankets and towels over the car windows so no one passing could see inside.
He ate in front of her and gave her nothing.
Hour after hour, she sat in that car while the world outside went on with an ordinary Friday.
And here is one of the most painful details in this entire case.
It comes from Midsy herself.
He would leave me in the car to go watch my mom [music] cry on TV.
Sit with that for a moment.
While Susanna Velasco stood in [music] front of television cameras begging for her daughter’s return, the man who took that daughter was watching.
[music] The coverage was everywhere.
A newspaper headline that week carried just four [music] words.
Just bring her back.
But inside [music] that car, something else was happening.
Something the man did not notice.
Midsy was not giving up.
On Friday, she found a nail file.
She worked it into the padlock on her chain, trying to pick it open.
She kept at it until the [music] tip of the file snapped off inside the lock.
Think about what that took.
She was 8 years old, chained, hungry, [music] terrified, and she was still planning her escape.
The nail file did not work, so she waited.
Friday night, the man parked his car in an industrial area of Santa Clara, more than 60 miles from Vallejo, near a business where he used to work.
[music] Midsy spent a second night on the front seat of that car.
Two nights, two days, one chain.
And somewhere in the Bay Area, a truck driver who was supposed to have Saturday off was about to get a phone call asking him to come in to work.
Saturday morning, [music] August 12th, around 11:00, the car was still parked in that industrial part of Santa Clara.
The man got out.
For a few minutes, Midsy was alone.
And he made a mistake.
He left his ring of keys behind.
Midsy [music] saw them.
A whole ring of keys, big ones and small ones.
She did not know which [music] one would fit.
She did not have time to try them all.
So, she did what an 8-year-old does.
She looked at the [music] lock.
She looked at the keys.
And she picked the smallest one.
It went in.
She turned it.
The padlock [music] opened.
Picture that moment.
The chain that had held her for two days goes slack.
For the first time since [music] Thursday afternoon, nothing is holding her down.
She did not wait to see if he was coming back.
She climbed out through the car window and [music] dropped to the ground.
And then she heard him.
He was yelling at her to get back in the car.
Midsy turned around and looked at him.
And she shook her head.
No, that is the whole story right there in one small movement of a little girl’s head.
Two days of fear, one answer.
No, I am not coming back.
And then Midsy Sanchez ran.
If you’re still here with Midsy, if you felt that moment when the chain came loose, type I’m still here in the [music] comments.
Let her story know it’s being heard because what happens in the next few seconds on Laurelwood Road is the reason she lived to tell it.
Carl Tfua was 34 years old.
He was a truck driver for Viking Freight, working pickups and deliveries out of San Jose.
He was not supposed to be working that Saturday.
It was his day off.
But the company called and asked if he could come in and do some extra work.
He said yes.
That is the kind of decision [music] nobody remembers.
One phone call, one yes.
An ordinary man picking [music] up an extra shift.
That morning, he had just pulled out of the company yard onto Laurelwood Road in Santa Clara.
His window was down [music] and a little girl came running straight at his truck.
She did not wave.
She did not stop at the curb and [music] call out.
She ran right up to the truck, climbed the two steps to the cab door, and crawled through his open window into his lap.
Carl Tafua later remembered exactly what she was screaming.
Here he comes.
He’s going to [music] kill me.
Imagine being that driver.
A few seconds ago, you were thinking about your first [music] delivery.
Now, there is a terrified child in your lap, and a grown man is somewhere behind her.
Here is what makes this moment so remarkable.
Carl Tfua already knew about the missing girl from Vallejo.
He had heard about her on the news.
Her face had been everywhere for 2 days.
And now she gave him the one thing that turned a frightened stranger into a case that could be solved.
She told him who she was.
My name is Midsy Sanchez.
That’s the moment in the title.
A trucker heard her name.
Think about what those words did.
In one sentence, an 8-year-old girl connected herself to every police officer, every volunteer, and every news report in the Bay Area.
She was not just a [music] child in danger anymore.
She was the child everyone had been looking for and she was alive.
Behind her, [music] the man saw what had happened.
He got into his car and pulled away fast.
But Carl Tafua was watching.
As the car drove off, he took down the [music] license plate number.
He used his truck’s two-way radio to get help, and he gave police [music] a description of the man and the plate.
Midsy showed him her ankle.
There was a bruise where the chain had been.
Police reached them on Laurelwood Road.
Midsy was taken [music] to the Santa Clara Police Station.
Officers there described her as shaken [music] but unheard.
Then someone handed her a phone.
On the other end was her mother.
Midsy told her mom that she missed her and Susanna Velasco told her daughter how much she loved her.
She told her the whole town had been out [music] looking for her.
Within a few hours, police had the man from the car in custody.
The license plate the truck driver wrote down had led them straight to him.
One extra shift, one open window, one name spoken out loud by a little girl who refused to go back.
But that license plate was about to open a much bigger door because the name behind it would turn the whole Bay Area’s attention back to a 7-year-old who was still missing.
That Saturday afternoon, the news moved through Vallejo like a wave.
Midsy Sanchez had escaped.
She was alive.
Doctors at Sutter Solano Hospital in Vallejo examined her and said she was in good condition.
And that night she went home.
Her father, [music] Juan Carlos Sanchez, carried her into the house.
Outside a crowd had gathered on the front [music] lawn.
Family, neighbors, strangers who had spent two days searching for a girl they had never met.
The front window was decorated with gifts and balloons.
Midsy [music] watched them from an upstairs window, safe in her father’s arms, and the crowd below began to sing.
Happy birthday, [music] dear Midsy.
Happy birthday to you.
She was crying and she was [music] smiling both at once.
The birthday party that was supposed to happen on Thursday [music] finally happened two days late with half the town in the yard.
Her mother [music] said it best.
She is a hero.
She got away.
She outsmarted him.
Remember what Susanna had always told her daughter.
If anyone ever takes [music] you, do anything you can to get away.
Midsy did exactly that.
But this is a documentary, not a fairy tale.
And the honest truth is that a birthday party cannot undo two days in that car.
Midsy would later say that everyone around her was full of love and support that night, but that she was not okay.
She was not okay for a long time.
We will come back to that because what this kidnapping survivor did with that pain is one of the most important parts of this story.
That same weekend, 2 miles away, Stephanie Kahalakulu was asking the question every family in her position would ask.
Who was this man?
And did he know where Zeanna was?
His name was Curtis Dean Anderson.
He was 39 years old.
He was an ex-convict with a long criminal history.
He had worked as a taxi driver in Vallejo.
The car he used that week was a 1984 Oldsmobile Fenza.
In other words, he was not a stranger to these streets.
He had driven [music] them for a living.
Within 2 days of Midsy’s escape, Curtis Dean Anderson was charged with [music] kidnapping her along with four more serious charges connected to what he had done to her in that car.
And almost immediately, Vallejo police began [music] asking whether he was connected to Siana Fairchild.
There were [music] reasons to ask.
Two little girls, both from Vallejo, both taken on their way to or from school, [music] less than 2 mi apart, 8 months apart.
Reports at the time said investigators had learned Anderson had visited the apartment complex where Siana lived, not long before she vanished.
For Siana’s [music] family, Midsy’s escape was the first real hope they had felt in months.
One national newspaper captured it in a headline, “A missing girl’s family finding hope in another girl’s escape.”
But hope is not evidence.
Investigators were careful.
They said publicly that they had not found anything linking Anderson to Ziana.
No physical evidence, no proven connection.
So Stephanie Kahalakulu did something remarkable.
Between October and December of 2000, she went to the jail and sat across from Curtis Dean Anderson herself more than once.
Think about what that took facing the man accused of taking another little girl because he might know where yours is.
And in those meetings, Anderson began to talk.
He told her that he had taken Zeanna, that he had taken her from a bus stop on the morning of December 9th, but he claimed he had kept her for a while and then handed her over alive to someone else.
He told similar stories [music] to reporters.
It was the crulest possible thing to say to a family that had been searching for a year.
It gave them hope that she was alive, and it [music] gave them nothing they could actually use.
Investigators [music] tried to check his claims.
They could not confirm them.
So, the waiting went on into a second winter past the first anniversary [music] of the morning she disappeared.
And then on January 19th, 2001, two workers on a winding mountain road in Santa Clara [music] County found something in the brush.
Soda Springs Road climbs into the Santa Cruz Mountains above Lexington Reservoir about 60 mi south of Vallejo.
That is where the workers found pieces of a child’s [music] skull.
For about 2 weeks, nobody could say for sure who she was.
Then the Santa Clara County Medical Examiner confirmed it through dental records and DNA.
It was Zeanna Fairchild.
We will not dwell on that discovery.
What matters is what it meant.
The little girl from the flyers and the billboards was not coming home.
And the claim that she had been handed off alive had never been true.
The search for Zeanna was over.
The search for answers was not.
Investigators brought Anderson to that mountain road.
About 50 Vallejo police officers and Santa Clara County Sheriff’s deputies combed the heavy brush with search dogs, looking for anything that could connect him to Siana’s death.
A sheriff spokesman said something that stayed with everyone who heard it.
He seems familiar with the area.
Vallejo police [music] called him a prime suspect, but they still did not have the proof they needed to charge him.
On February [music] 11th, more than 600 people gathered in Vallejo to mourn Ziana [music] 14 months after she disappeared.
Most of them had never met her.
That was the point.
Musicians played traditional Hawaiian songs for the islands where she grew up.
Stephanie Kahalikulu thanked the crowd.
She told them that only a handful of people there had ever met Siana, [music] and yet everyone had cared for her and loved her.
Around that same time, [music] Siana’s family gathered outside the search headquarters in Vallejo.
They released [music] balloons into the sky, each one carrying a note to Siana.
And standing with them holding a balloon of her own, was an 8-year-old girl Midsy Sanchez.
Look at that picture for a moment.
The girl who came home standing beside the family of the girl who did not.
[music] Both taken by the same man, both from the same town, one of them alive to say goodbye to the other.
Stephanie Kahalakulu planned to bury Siana in Hawaii where she grew up.
But first, there was a trial, and the most important witness in it was 8 years old.
April 2001, Salano County Superior Court.
Curtis Dean Anderson went on trial for the kidnapping of Midsy Sanchez and for what he did to her in that car.
The jury watched a videotaped interview Midsy had given investigators after her escape and then they heard from Midsy herself.
She walked into a crowded courtroom.
She took the witness stand and with the man who took her sitting in the same room, she told the jury what happened.
She did not cry.
Her father [music] could not stay.
He had to walk out of the courtroom while she spoke.
But Midsy [music] kept going.
Think about that.
Grown adults in that room could barely listen [music] to what she was saying.
And the 8-year-old who lived through it sat there and said it out loud.
In May, [music] the jury came back after about 6 hours of deliberation.
They found Anderson guilty on 11 counts.
In June, [music] the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children gave Midsy a medal.
It was the organization’s first ever courage award.
They gave it to her for one reason.
She had freed herself.
Then came sentencing.
Midsy had written a statement for the judge.
She had planned to read it herself.
Earlier that week, she had carefully written out exactly what she wanted to say.
On the morning of the hearing, she changed two things.
She decided her older sister should read it for her.
And minutes before court began, she hurriedly rewrote the whole statement.
Her sister stood up in front of the crowded courtroom and read it.
Midsy wanted him to know that he had kept her away from her family, and she wanted him to know something else.
Anderson needs to be taught a good lesson.
Then the judge did exactly that.
251 years in state prison.
Anderson sat through it in a wheelchair in a blue jail jumpsuit.
And when the sentence was read, Midsy’s family [music] cheered.
He would never walk free again.
But for Siana’s family, it was not the sentence they were [music] waiting for.
Because Curtis Dean Anderson had still never been charged with what he did to Ziana Fairchild.
Years passed.
Every December, Siana’s family [music] mark the day she disappeared.
On the second anniversary, Stephanie Kahalakulu and members of the Siana Fairchild Foundation led a candlelight walk along the path Siana took toward her bus stop on that last morning.
That same day, they held a toy drive [music] for children in need called Siana’s Angel Tree.
A family that had lost a child [music] spending her anniversary giving to other children.
Hold on to that.
It is a pattern you will see again in this story.
Behind the [music] scenes, investigators had not stopped.
And in May of 2004, the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office finally announced charges, murder, kidnapping, and related counts in the death of Zeanna Fairchild.
Authorities said Anderson had admitted in interviews from behind bars that he kidnapped her.
He pleaded [music] not guilty.
And then on December 15th, 2005, almost 6 years to the week after Siana disappeared, Curtis Dean Anderson stood up in a courtroom and suddenly pleaded guilty to kidnapping Siana and to her murder.
Her family had not seen it coming.
After all the games, all the false claims, all the visits that led nowhere, they finally heard him say it.
He received another 50 years to life.
Together with his sentence for Midsy, he would now serve more than 300 years.
And every bit of it traces back to one moment on Laurelwood Road.
Without Midsy’s escape, there is no license plate.
Without the license plate, there is no arrest.
And without the arrest, Siana’s [music] family might still be handing out flyers today.
But Anderson still had one more thing to say.
In [music] November of 2007, FBI agents sat down with him in prison.
By then, he was gravely [music] ill.
In that interview, he confessed to the FBI that he had killed eight people in the United States.
One of them was Ziana.
[music] He also claimed two more killings in Mexico, but gave no details about them [music] at all.
The FBI took his confession seriously enough to publish an appeal.
They asked the public for help identifying the alleged victims he had described.
Weeks later, Curtis Dean Anderson died in prison of kidney failure.
He was 46.
The date was December 9th, 2007.
Stop on that date.
December 9th, exactly 8 years to the day [music] after Siana Fairchild set out for school and never came home.
It is not justice.
[music] It does not mean anything on its own.
But for the people who had spent those 8 years searching, it was impossible not to notice.
And one of the names in his confession reached back even further than Zeana to another town, another family, [music] and a question that is still open today.
June 3rd, 1988.
Polo, California.
A small city on San Pablo Bay, not far from Vallejo.
7-year-old Amber Schwarz Garcia was jumping rope outside the home she shared with her mother, Kim [music] Schwarz, on Savage Avenue.
And then she was gone.
For nearly 20 years, her family had no [music] answers.
Then in November of 2007, Anderson told the FBI [music] that he had taken Amber, too.
Investigators learned that Anderson knew Poli [music] streets.
He had worked there as a cab driver and as someone who delivered lost luggage to airline passengers.
But his confession [music] came with a condition.
In a short handwritten statement, he said he would admit his role in Amber’s death only if prosecutors [music] did not seek the death penalty.
He told investigators he had taken Amber on a drive to Arizona and that her remains were somewhere in the desert there.
For a year and a half, the FBI and the Panol police worked to check his story.
[music] In July of 2009, they announced they believed him and they closed the case.
When they did, authorities said the former taxi driver from Vallejo could now be called what many had suspected for years, a serial killer.
But Amber was never found.
Kim Schwarz never stopped questioning it.
She has said she believes Anderson confessed to make a name for himself and to keep himself off death [music] row.
A woman who had once cared for Amber at daycare started a petition asking police to look again.
About 1,300 people signed it.
In 2013, the Penol [music] police reopened the case.
The police chief said nothing had disproved Anderson’s confession, but he wanted to use modern forensic science because Amber had still not been found.
Kim Schwarz said that strange as it sounds, it made her feel like the happiest mother of a missing child.
Here is where this part of the story lands.
Two things are true at once.
Anderson confessed to taking [music] Amber Schwartz Garcia and the authorities believed him.
And Amber’s mother is still [music] waiting for proof she can hold.
Both of those things can be true.
Both of them deserve to be heard.
And that brings us back to the one child in this story [music] who came home.
Because the hardest part of Midsy’s life did not end on Laurelwood Road.
After the [music] escape, after the trial, after the medal and the cameras, Midsy Sanchez went back to being a little girl in Vallejo and everybody knew her name.
For the first few years, she was in therapy.
Sports helped.
For a while, it seemed like she might be okay.
But when she was about 12, her life started to come apart.
She tore a ligament in her knee and lost the sport that had been keeping her steady.
She started drinking.
She got into drugs.
The girl who had once been the bravest child in the Bay Area was now in serious danger again.
This time, the danger was coming from the inside.
A Vallejo police lieutenant who had worked her case later admitted that he feared she would not survive.
People who loved her were bracing for the worst.
And still, even then, part of her kept reaching out to other families.
In the spring of 2009, when another little girl, Sandra Cantou, went missing in Northern California, [music] 16-year-old Midsy showed up and spoke at a vigil during the search.
A few weeks later, she [music] was nearly killed.
It was the early morning of May 1st, 2009.
Midsy was a passenger in a pickup truck in Vallejo.
Police said the driver had been drinking.
The truck crossed the center median, struck a street light, and overturned.
Midsy was flown by helicopter to [music] John Mure Medical Center in Walnut Creek with major injuries.
Doctors gave her mother a frightening prognosis.
They warned that Midsy might never walk again.
Once again, Midsy Sanchez was fighting for her life.
And once [music] again, she found a way out.
Coming home from the hospital, she learned that she was pregnant with [music] a baby girl.
Midsy has called that her wakeup call.
The moment everything changed, she has said [music] that becoming a mother changed her heart and the way she thought about her life.
So she rebuilt it.
She got clean.
She raised her daughter.
She went back to the world of missing children, but this time on the other side of the search.
She volunteered with the Clauss Kids Foundation, started by the father of Poly Clauss, the 12-year-old from Pedaluma who was kidnapped and killed in 1993.
When a teenager named Sierra Lamar disappeared in the South Bay in 2012, Midsy [music] became a regular presence at the search center.
A hug for a worried parent, a word of encouragement, a project for the kids who wanted to help.
She worked with children at the Solano County Family Justice Center.
She counseledled families going through the nightmare her own family once lived through.
Then she started her own organization, the Midsy Sanchez Foundation, [music] to bring child safety programs into elementary schools so that other 8-year-olds would know what she did not know on that Thursday [music] afternoon.
That an adult who asks a child for help is a warning sign, not a reason to say yes.
She has described her work as a way to take her [music] story with all its trauma and use it for triumph.
She went to work in Vallejo, eventually becoming [music] vice president of funeral services at a local company.
She has said that helping grieving [music] families feels like part of the same calling.
And she did something many people would find impossible.
She forgave Curtis Dean Anderson, not because what he [music] did was small, because she refused to carry him for the rest of her life.
She has never forgotten the girls who did not come [music] home.
She has said that when she thinks about Siana and Amber and all the others, it overwhelms her, that she owes it to them to make her life count.
Today, Midsy’s daughter knows her mother’s story and she talks to her own classmates about staying safe, about speaking up for themselves.
When Midsy [music] talks about where her strength came from, she points straight back to the people who raised her.
My family has some seriously strong people.
Remember the two rules Susanna Velasco taught her daughter.
Stay away from [music] strangers, and if anyone ever takes you, do anything you can to get away.
Midsy has spent her adult life passing the first one on to other children because she proved the second one better than anyone ever could.
So, let’s go back one last time.
Saturday [music] morning, August 12th, 2000, Laurelwood Road, Santa Clara.
A delivery truck pulls out of the company yard.
[music] The driver is only there because he said yes to an extra shift.
His window is down.
A little girl runs toward that truck, 80 lb, 2 days without food, a bruise on her ankle where a [music] chain had been.
She climbs the two steps, crawls through the open window, and lands in a stranger’s lap, and she tells him her name.
Now you [music] know everything those words were carrying.
Two days in a car with blankets over the windows.
A mother crying on television.
A nail file with a broken tip.
A ring of keys and the smallest key on it.
A girl who [music] looked back at the man who took her and shook her head.
And 8 months of flyers and billboards for another little girl from the [music] same town whose family was still waiting for anyone to tell them the truth.
Curtis Dean Anderson took two girls from Vallejo.
He was sure one of them would never be found.
He was sure the other one would never get away.
He was wrong about both because Midsy Sanchez escaped and when she did, she brought him down with her.
And the answers Siana Fairchild’s family had been begging for [music] finally began to come.
Carl Tfua never asked to be a hero.
Midsy has called him one anyway.
He was a [music] truck driver doing an extra shift who looked up at the right moment and wrote down a license plate.
That is how this story ends.
[music] Not with a detective or a manhunt.
With a little girl, an open window, and a stranger who listened when she said her name.
If Midsy’s story stayed with you, share it with someone who has children in their life.
A single conversation about strangers who ask for help could matter more than you will ever know.
And subscribe so you’re here for the next story of a child who [music] refused to give up.
Because Midsy was not the only one.
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