Parents Never Gave Up Hope

As FBI agents in San Diego and Puerto Rico continued to investigate the 1990 kidnapping of 14-month-old Crystal Leann Anzaldi, her parents said Tuesday they never gave up hope that their daughter would be found alive.

“This just put me into tears,” Jeffrey Anzaldi, the child’s father, said of the news that Crystal, now 8, had been found. “I was so happy I couldn’t talk. All I could do was sit in a chair.”

A federal grand jury, which may meet as soon as Friday, has been convened in San Diego to decide whether to press criminal charges.

Child welfare officials in San Juan, Puerto Rico found the girl last month in the custody of Nilza Gierbolini Guzman, 35, who claimed to be her mother. The suspect lived in San Diego at the time of the kidnapping but moved to Puerto Rico soon afterward. She has been jailed awaiting possible kidnapping charges.

FBI agents and a San Diego police detective went to Puerto Rico last week after authorities determined through DNA tests that the girl known as Sonya was actually Crystal Leann Anzaldi. The toddler was kidnapped Dec. 8, 1990, from a San Diego apartment while her parents slept.

Jeffrey Anzaldi, now divorced from the girl’s mother and living near Banks, Ore., said he has not been told how or why his child was taken to Puerto Rico. The 29-year-old computer software technician said he is determined that Crystal live with him, her sister Kendra, and his new wife and baby.

Kendra Anzaldi, 10, told reporters of her shock to learn that her sister was alive. “I kind of froze and cried. If she was alive or dead, I didn’t know.”

In the Northern California community of Corning, Dorothy Anzaldi, 37, the child’s mother, said that “not knowing has been very hard. Not a day went by when I didn’t think about it. I’m a victim here too.”

Dorothy Anzaldi said she suffered major injuries in a Sept. 25 car crash but is convinced that God spared her so she could be reunited with her daughter. She said she wants custody.

San Diego Police Sgt. Jim Munsterman said the child has been told that the woman she called mommy is not her mother and that her real parents live in the United States.

“This case has been very troublesome to me, waiting all these years for a happy ending,” said Munsterman, who led the 1990 task force that investigated the disappearance and last week traveled to Puerto Rico. “To be honest, I thought we might never get that happy ending. Most of the time in these cases you don’t.”

Munsterman said there is no indication that Gierbolini Guzman and her then-husband knew the Anzaldis in San Diego. There is evidence, however, that the two families had mutual acquaintances who lived in the apartment building where the Anzaldis were staying when Crystal was snatched, Munsterman said.

He said Crystal has responded well to the prospect of meeting her parents and getting a new name. “She said she liked the name Crystal, that it was pretty,” Munsterman said.

The child, reportedly in good physical health, is in a foster home in Puerto Rico while social service officials determine who should get custody.

When she was kidnapped, Crystal was in diapers and was learning to walk but not yet ready to talk. Now she has long brown hair, a cheerful manner and speaks Spanish.

During the investigation, authorities closely scrutinized her parents’ home environment and, in an unusual move, removed Kendra from the family in 1990 while hunting for Crystal in San Diego and Mexico.

Kendra was later released to her grandparents; last year, as part of the couple’s divorce, Jeffrey Anzaldi received custody.

The apartment where the family was staying at the time of the kidnapping was in a neighborhood known for heavy drug use. In the past, Jeffrey Anzaldi has accused his ex-wife of using drugs and suggested that Crystal was stolen out of retaliation, a charge that Dorothy Anzaldi vehemently denied.

Jeffrey Anzaldi and Gierbolini Guzman’s then-husband were both in the Navy stationed in San Diego in 1990. But Munsterman said Navy officials have indicated that the two men did not serve in the same command. The suspect has since remarried, and there are indications that her second husband did not know that Crystal was not her child.

The case began to unravel when the suspect and her second husband got into a fight and Puerto Rican police entered their home.

After being suspicious of what appeared to be a phony birth certificate for the child, police referred the case to the social service workers who combed through the files of missing children placed on the Internet by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

A distinctive birthmark on the girl’s nose led to suspicion that the child was Crystal Anzaldi, a hunch confirmed when the FBI arranged for her father to take a DNA test.

Jeffrey and Dorothy Anzaldi are scheduled to testify before the grand jury. Dorothy Anzaldi said she knows nothing more than she told police in 1990.

“I went to sleep,” Dorothy Anzaldi said. “I woke up the next morning, and she was gone.”

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Associated Press contributed to this story.