Kidnapped by Her Grandparents and Raised on the Run

On a steamy August afternoon in 1989, Irene and Raul Lopez packed up a travel trailer, picked up their granddaughter and began driving north out of the Florida Everglades to a new life in hiding.

They had been preparing in secret for two months. They had sold their land, a lush tangle of saw grass and holly shaded by ficus trees, for a pittance in cash. They had jettisoned the fiberglass business they built after fleeing Cuba in the early 1960s. To confuse pursuers, they had traded in their car.

As they edged their trailer onto the two-lane blacktop, the sun glared savagely off the drainage canals. Fish surfaced with a gurgle, grazing air that was scarcely drier than the water.

They were off.

Thirteen years later, they are still in hiding, the three of them, somewhere in Southern California.

Kaylee Nicole Lopez was 5 years old -- bubbly, green-eyed and precocious -- when her grandparents spirited her away. They did it, they said, to protect her from sexual abuse at the hands of both her father and stepfather.

Or did they?

Today, it seems almost impossible to piece together the truth of Kaylee’s life story, refracted as it is through a small girl’s long-ago memory, the conflicting statements of adults on all sides and a fragmentary legal record.

She is 18 now, a dark-haired, thoughtful, emotionally fragile young woman who looks strikingly like the age-enhanced photograph circulated by law enforcement officials two years ago. Since her birthday in February, Kaylee has taken shaky steps into the open, to establish a normal life and use her real name -- to put her ordeal behind her.

She fears, however, that her freedom will come at the expense of her grandparents, who are still being sought by state and federal authorities for violating child custody laws.

Many children who were taken under similar circumstances in the late 1980s are now, like Kaylee, entering adulthood and facing fundamental questions: Who am I? What is my name? Who can I trust?

“I can talk to people and have the most normal conversation,” Kaylee said one recent morning, “and they can say something and suddenly I’m crying uncontrollably. It’s like when you’re playing with your friends and they’re hitting you with a pillow. It’s this terrifying feeling, like you’re being dragged under and you can’t breathe.”

She spoke in her lawyer’s office in Redondo Beach, a nun at her side. The nun, who was introduced as Sister Mary, a fictitious name, has been Kaylee’s shepherd through the last 12 years of her underground existence. As Kaylee talked, Sister Mary stroked her hand.

Speaking with assurance, her tone flush with indignation, Kaylee unfurled an autobiography of abuse.

When she was 1, she said, her mother abandoned her.

When she was 2, she said, her grandparents discovered that her father, who had moved into their house, was sexually abusing her. They kicked him out.

When she was 4, she said, her mother reclaimed her -- and then watched while Kaylee’s new stepfather sexually abused her.

When she was 5, she said, her grandparents saved her.

She said she doesn’t remember specific acts of abuse by her father, but does recall the awful feeling she had when he was around.

“The first memory I have of him, I was running through the house trying to find something to hide under because I didn’t want to be near him,” she said. “I was terrified. I was petrified of being near him.”

As for her stepfather, she said, she can picture him abusing her. He would come into her room at night.

“It’s hazy,” she said, but “I know what happened to me, and I know who did it. The memories and associations of pain and fear that I went through -- it’s unmistakable to me what caused them, and who.”

Underground Network

Kaylee and her grandparents, who recounted their story in a series of interviews over the spring and summer, left Florida at the height of a national panic over child sexual abuse. There were horrifying accusations of abuse at such places as the McMartin Pre-School in Manhattan Beach and the Little Rascals Day Care Center in Edenton, N.C. Although most of the allegations were later discredited, they fostered a sense of anxiety among parents nationwide.

In the late 1980s, an underground organization sprang up to help people -- mothers, mostly -- who believed that their children were being abused by the other parent. If courts wound up siding with the alleged abusers, these parents would kidnap their own children. A coast-to-coast network, Children of the Underground, offered shelter and helped runaway parents rebuild their lives under new names.

Sometimes the abducting parents were wrong; their spouses were not abusers. Some parents would say anything -- and believe anything -- to justify their quest for sole custody of their children. But Children of the Underground, led by an outspoken Georgia woman, Faye Yager, believed the child welfare system was stacked in favor of child abusers. To protect the children, the group contended, parents -- or grandparents -- would have to become outlaws.

The Lopezes’ story is rooted in a bitter custody battle in the family court system of Dade County, which takes in Miami and its environs. The voluminous case file was sealed by a judge, a standard practice in such cases in Florida. So the accounts of the participants, along with scattered documents they provided, offer the only window into what happened.

Irene Lopez offered her version in a series of telephone interviews arranged by the grandparents’ lawyer. The location from which she was calling, and many details of the Lopezes’ lives, were masked by the lawyer to protect the couple from arrest.

By Irene Lopez’s account, she and her husband had effectively been Kaylee’s parents since 1985, when the girl was a year old. The grandparents say Kaylee’s mother, whom they describe as selfish, irresponsible and promiscuous, had abandoned her.

The following year, they came to believe their son was abusing his daughter while living under their roof. They took her for a medical examination. Doctors found no sign of sexual abuse, but the Lopezes remained certain it had happened. They said they could tell from Kaylee’s behavior. “The way she acted,” Irene Lopez said. “I don’t know if I can explain more than that.”

Their son, Raul Jr., was a stocky ex-Marine in his early 20s who was having emotional and financial troubles after splitting up with his wife. As difficult as it was, Irene Lopez said, “we asked him to leave the house.”

For the next few years, the grandparents had temporary legal custody of Kaylee. A judge granted visitation rights to the girl’s mother, who was remarrying.

When Kaylee began spending time at her mother’s, the grandparents grew to suspect she was being sexually abused by her stepfather. She begged not to go, Irene Lopez said, and each time she returned, her speech had regressed. After one such visit, the grandparents said, they took Kaylee to a rape treatment center, where a doctor found evidence of abuse.

Based on that evidence, they went back to family court, demanding custody. A judge ordered another psychologist to examine the girl. That doctor, the grandparents said, discounted their allegations, and the judge awarded full custody to the mother and stepfather.

In desperation, Irene Lopez called Faye Yager.

“She told me that she needed proof that we were abused by the legal system, that was the only way she would help us,” the grandmother recalled. “So I sent her, Federal Express, all the papers from court....

“We flew to Atlanta, Ga., and we waited in a hotel until she was able to come. It was after midnight, and she spent the whole night explaining many things.... She told us how to do everything.”

They returned to Florida and began laying their plans. They picked up Kaylee from her mother on the afternoon of Aug. 11, 1989, for a birthday dinner. The grandparents were both turning 50 within the next two days.

They said they’d have her back by 8:30 p.m.

Their first stop was Atlanta, where someone in the underground gave them the address of an RV park. Yager came to see them there, and gave them their next destination: North Carolina, where they could park the trailer in a yard. They were given a phone number and a code to use whenever they needed to call the underground.

From North Carolina, they were told to go to New York City for an appearance on the “Geraldo” TV show.

“It was stupid, you know,” Irene Lopez said. “We shouldn’t have done that.”

The grandparents disguised themselves with ill-fitting wigs and sunglasses for a show titled “Mothers Running from the Devil.” Kaylee, too, wore oversized sunglasses. In an interview with host Geraldo Rivera, Raul Lopez Sr. described how Kaylee had been sexually molested “by our own son -- my own son! -- and by her own mother and her stepfather.” Then he dropped a bombshell.

After they left Florida, the grandfather told Rivera, Kaylee “started talking and telling us all about the cult and the human sacrifice and the blood that she’d been drinking, and all that.”

With that, he was cut off -- the show was over.

“This,” declared Rivera, “cries for a congressional investigation!”

Today, the Lopezes’ lawyer, Carl A. “Tony” Capozzola, says they were coached to make those claims. “Words were put in their mouth,” Capozzola said. “There was nothing satanic.”

But Kaylee said her grandparents were telling the truth. “Yes,” she said, breaking into sobs. “I don’t think a child of that age would make something like that up.”

Nun Becomes Mentor

After “Geraldo,” the Lopezes went from New York to North Carolina to Michigan to South Dakota, stopping to pick up fake identification from a woman in the underground.

Kaylee remembers Mt. Rushmore and Niagara Falls. “It was like this big, elongated camping trip,” she said. “It was nice. It was like I was safe and nothing could happen.”

They spent their first Christmas in Texas. Raul Sr., who has skills as a fiberglass craftsman and a heavy equipment operator, found a job. Those were good times, Irene said, until she went to the mailbox one day and found fliers scattered on the ground. “Missing,” it said. “Kaylee Nicole Lopez.” There was Kaylee’s picture.

They left Texas that day. Southern California would be the last stop on their journey. It had been a year since they left Florida. By this time, Irene Lopez said, they had grown disenchanted with the Children of the Underground. They were being asked to move too often.

“You know,” she said, “the important thing not to be found is ... a good cover-up, good papers, you have to build up a good history.”

The papers they were given by the underground looked phony, she said. So Irene Lopez, a housewife who said she’d never even cheated on her taxes, found a book on forgery and made new documents -- including a driver’s license for Raul Sr.

Arriving in Southern California in the late summer of 1990, they went to a large church. There, Irene said, they spoke to a Catholic bishop -- she won’t say which one. That contact led them to Sister Mary, a principal at a Catholic elementary school. She made arrangements to admit Kaylee, then 6, into kindergarten under a fake name. The nun became the family’s guide and mentor.

Kaylee’s years in Southern California are reminiscent of some veterans’ descriptions of war: hours of boredom, moments of terror. A strange normality settled over her life at her grandparents’ mobile home. She developed friendships, including one with a girl she trusted enough to tell her life story. She spent a lot of time reading. Beneath it all was an ever-present sense of being on the run.

About six years ago, the Lopezes were living in a trailer park in Anaheim, not far from Disneyland. Kaylee was 12 or 13 and attending Catholic school.

One evening, two Anaheim police officers came to the door, asking for Irene and Kaylee Lopez. Raul Lopez Sr. said there was nobody there by those names. Kaylee was going by the name Christina. The officers asked to speak to her alone.

Had she ever heard the name Kaylee Lopez?

No, she said.

Had she ever been to Florida?

No.

Were the people in the trailer her family?

Yes.

“The last thing I said was, ‘Can I go inside now? I’m watching “Jeopardy” and I want to see if the archeologist wins,’ ” Kaylee recalled. It was, and is, her ambition to become an archeologist.

The Lopezes moved that night.

Kaylee stopped going to school -- it had become too risky -- and began home schooling.

“If we were to write a book about our lives,” Irene Lopez said in her soft Cuban accent, “it would be called ‘Running.’ We ran from communists, we ran for our lives from the legal system.... We’ve run from all those things.”

Her voice turned defiant. She scoffed at the authorities who refused to believe them and then, once they were gone, weren’t smart enough to find them.

“They underestimated us,” she said. “We were the paranoid grandparents, and they underestimated the power of love and the power of the light of God....

“I know no one will believe it, but there was a big light in front of us when we left. I was reading the Bible. We were very scared. My husband waked me up because I fell asleep from time to time. And he said, ‘I’m going to turn off the lights and tell me if you see a light.’ ... We turned off the lights and we could see the road far away. It was unbelievable. We felt like that light was guiding us.”

Restoring Kaylee’s Identity

At first, Tony Capozzola thought the Lopezes’ story sounded unlikely: “The grandparents are going to give up their lives, live as fugitives, just to have this girl live with them? Does that make sense to you?”

Capozzola is a Redondo Beach attorney whose ocean-view office is as brash and outsized as its occupant. He had heard the grandparents’ story from Sister Mary, who is an acquaintance of his. They needed his help, she said, to restore Kaylee’s identity and help settle the charges against them.

Despite his skepticism, Capozzola agreed to look into it. “Believe me,” he would say later, “I’ve looked at this from every angle, including that you’ve got some psycho grandparents.”

The Lopezes showed him a 1988 evaluation from the rape treatment center at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, where the grandparents took Kaylee after suspecting that her stepfather was abusing her. “Child spent weekend with ... stepfather,” the report said. “When she came home she was red down there.” It went on to describe how the girl told of being abused with a stick.

There was also a letter written about the same time by Simon Miranda, a Miami psychologist retained by the grandparents. After months of denials, he reported, the girl had come to him “in a more disclosing attitude” and described in graphic detail how her stepfather had abused her. The child, he said, belonged with her grandparents.

Finally, after hearing Kaylee’s account, Capozzola came to believe.

“The things that she was saying to me, in terms of the detail, and then the absolute terror that she still goes through, she can’t be coached on that,” he said. “You know that somebody was abusing her physically.”

Loss Stuns Raul Jr.

On a recent hot and humid day in Florida, Kaylee’s father, Raul Lopez Jr., hopped the barbed-wire fence that surrounds his parents’ old property, in the Redlands area southwest of Miami, and landed in knee-high grass. “I’m not trying to scare you,” he said, “but there’s snakes out here. There’s alligators.”

Raul Jr. is 40, a chatty, boyish-faced man who has retained the crisp manner and haircut of a Marine, even as the barrel chest of his youth has rolled toward his waist.

To him, this patch of reclaimed swamp, still deserted and littered with the wreckage of his father’s fiberglass shop, is both hallowed and cursed. Raul Jr. grew up here with two sisters, he said, under the domineering control of his parents, Raul Sr. and Irene.

By his account and those of family members and friends, it was a difficult childhood. His father, said Raul Jr., had a raging temper and beat the children, either with his fists or with a length of black hose he kept in a closet. His sisters, Raul added, were not allowed to have boyfriends.

“When we spoke to my father, we had to stand at attention and look down -- we couldn’t look him in the eyes,” he said. “We weren’t a normal family.”

“They were very abused kids,” said Raul Jr.’s aunt, Odilia Lopez, who has known the senior Lopezes since the three of them were young together in Cuba. “If they asked for water, they would get slapped in the face.”

Through their lawyer, the grandparents rejected these assertions. Capozzola said the couple denied ever abusing their son, despite what they described as his “uncontrollable” behavior as a youth.

Raul Jr. had come to his parents’ house that August night 13 years ago. He had gotten a call from his ex-wife, Lora Coleman, saying the grandparents hadn’t returned Kaylee.

“I got out there and everything was dark, man, out in the middle of nowhere.... When I ran up to the house and I saw that there were no curtains -- it’s like, you hear a freight train going by and all of a sudden you get those butterflies in your stomach and your legs get icy cold. It was just a real bad feeling.”

Raul Jr. waited all night, thinking there must be some mistake. “With the sun up and daylight, it was very apparent.” His parents had taken his child.

The loss, in one bitter moment, of both his parents and his daughter plunged Raul Jr. into a deep depression. At first, he couldn’t work, he said. When he could, his boss at a computer service company accommodated him with a less demanding assignment. Ultimately, he regained his equilibrium by dedicating himself to finding his daughter. When he had an opportunity to become a Miami-based Latin American sales representative for a Chinese computer company, he grabbed it and used it as a launching pad for his search.

Over the next several years, by Raul Jr.’s account, he looked for Kaylee in the United States, Argentina, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Paraguay, Uruguay and Brazil.

Sometimes, there was a logic behind his search. In Argentina, he looked up long-lost relatives -- had they heard anything from Raul Sr. and Irene? In other places, he said, he was flying on a hunch and a prayer. In every country, he tried to make friends with police, pressing into their hands stacks of handbills with Kaylee’s picture. Who knew when it might pay off?

Sometimes, back home in Florida, he’d take a drive out into the Everglades, out past his parents’ old land, out past the mango and coconut groves to where no one could hear him.

Stepping out of his car, he would turn his face to the sky and yell at God.

“I hate you! I hate you, man!”

Last year, not long after he was “born again” as an evangelical Christian, Raul Jr. quit his job, tired of the traveling that kept him from his second wife, Helena, and his two sons, who are Kaylee’s half-brothers. He is now president of a Miami company that reconditions, sells and services computers. Recently, he established a Web site, kayleelopez.com, aimed at telling Kaylee about her family.

“Kaylee, our dad has always told us about you,” reads a typical passage from her half-brothers, 9-year-old Kyle and 11-year-old Adrian. “We pray for you every night before we go to bed. We often wonder where you could be and we wish you could have seen us at our Karate Competition Tournaments.... It was way cool.”

A Mother’s Heartbreak

Like Raul Jr., Lora Coleman was shattered by the loss of her daughter. The night Kaylee disappeared, she stayed up all night.

Coleman is portrayed by the elder Lopezes as a wild woman, reckless and depraved. It is not a description that appears to fit her today. She is calm and reasoned; her face, framed by reddish-blond hair, radiates quiet concern. She agreed to be interviewed only reluctantly, saying she didn’t want Kaylee to learn the truth about her family from a newspaper story. She spoke cautiously and declined to provide documents that might bolster her position, although she alone, it appears, saved most of the papers from the custody dispute.

For her, the case was a cog’s-eye view into the machinery of the child welfare system. “My goal, if I survived this, was that I was going into social work,” she said in an interview at the south Miami home she shares with her two younger daughters, Kaylee’s half-sisters.

After she got over the shock of Kaylee’s disappearance, she said, “I got up, dusted off my britches and went back to school.” She earned a master’s degree in social work and has been working in that field for the last three years, two of them in a child welfare unit in Dade County.

Coleman is originally from Kentucky, a descendant of the Hatfields, whose feud with the McCoys is part of American lore. She and Raul were high school sweethearts in Miami who married when she was 17. He was 18 and a Marine on active duty at Camp Lejeune, N.C. They returned to Miami not long after Kaylee’s birth.

Raul Jr. blames the stresses of military life for destroying their marriage. Coleman blames Raul Jr. “The situation I was in ... was not good, was not healthy,” she said. “It was one where I often feared for my life and my safety.”

Told that Kaylee recalled being terrified of her father, Coleman said, “I have memories of being terrified of Raul too.”

Raul Jr., she said, was deeply under the sway of his parents. She said she decided to divorce him when, on the first Mother’s Day after Kaylee was born, Raul Jr. took Kaylee to be with his parents for the day, leaving Coleman alone.

The senior Lopezes, she said, always had a fixation with Kaylee: “From the moment I became pregnant, it was like it was their child.”

Coleman said she never abandoned Kaylee, as the grandparents claimed. In fact, after she left Raul Jr., she said, his parents made it impossible for her to see her daughter. “They would literally lock the gate,” she said.

She also worried about the conditions under which Kaylee was living, in a dilapidated mobile home with no window screens.

Raul Jr. was also living there. At his parents’ urging, he sought and was granted sole custody of Kaylee. At the time, he was working two jobs and going to school.

Eventually, he said, he began to think Kaylee belonged with her mother. He considered moving to New York to be out of his parents’ shadow.

Before he could act, he said, child welfare officials received an anonymous accusation that he had sexually abused Kaylee.

Parents Tip Police

Raul Jr. is a man who seems, in some ways, uncertain of himself. He apologizes frequently. With strangers, he is polite to a fault. But he is absolutely adamant about one thing.

“I did not sexually molest my daughter,” he said. “It turns my stomach how somebody could do something so horrific.... I underwent countless hours of evaluation by the state psychologist. I underwent polygraphs, I was willing to do whatever.”

In the end, he was cleared of any wrongdoing.

At the time, Raul Jr. said, he assumed that his ex-wife had made the accusation against him. Only later, he said, did his lawyer show him a transcript of a 911 call that identified his parents as the tipsters.

“Here I am, I’m in the middle of one of the worst periods of my life. I’m going through a divorce. I’m a young man, I’m totally confused ... and all I did was go to my parents for help,” he said.

Eventually, Coleman said, the grandparents “just started allegation after allegation against everybody.” When she and her new husband, Allen Cribbs, got visitation rights for Kaylee to spend the night with them, Cribbs became the target of an anonymous charge.

This is the most detailed allegation of abuse. It is the one the grandparents have bolstered with the evaluation from the Jackson Memorial Hospital rape treatment center and with Miranda’s psychological report.

Dr. Dorothy Hicks examined Kaylee at the rape center. Now retired, Hicks said she doesn’t remember the case. But when she heard a description of the single-page document the grandparents turned over to Capozzola, their attorney, she said it sounded odd. There should be a second page, Hicks said, containing her conclusion.

On the document given to Capozzola, many of the details of the examination of Kaylee are illegible. Kaylee’s description of her stepfather placing a stick on her genitals is the only part that is legible.

Coleman and Cribbs insist that the second page of Hicks’ report contained the conclusion that Kaylee had not been sexually abused. They refused, however, to provide a copy. Coleman said it seemed improper to divulge such personal details.

Efforts to reach the grandparents for comment on this issue were unsuccessful. Capozzola said they did not want to discuss their case further.

In contrast to Hicks’ evaluation, Miranda’s report is quite legible, and it makes for unsettling reading. It graphically repeats Kaylee’s accusations against her stepfather and quotes her use of obscene language, and her grandparents’ assertion that her vocabulary was becoming rife with sexual overtones.

“She also stated that she did not want to live with her mother,” the report said. It quoted Kaylee: “ ‘Cause ... I am scared of her.”

Miranda also wrote that he spoke to Hicks after she examined Kaylee and that the doctor reported “findings consistent with molestation.”

Nevertheless, Coleman, Cribbs and Raul Lopez Jr. all say they believe Kaylee was coached to say she had been molested. Further, they said, she may believe today that she remembers something that never occurred.

“They’ve been brainwashing this kid since she was a little infant,” Coleman said.

Cribbs, who was divorced from Coleman last year, is an affable, deeply tanned man with a goatee who still lives in the house where Kaylee was living when she was whisked off by her grandparents. He was a carpenter then, he said, and is now a general contractor. When he was accused of abuse, he and Coleman had recently married and had their first daughter. A child welfare worker came to their house at 3 a.m., he said, to investigate.

Ultimately, he was cleared.

“OK, that didn’t happen,” was all he would say about the matter.

Although his relations with Cribbs are uneasy, Raul Jr. is almost as insistent about the stepfather’s innocence as he is about his own. He praised Cribbs as a good father who never would have abused Kaylee. “I know he didn’t do it,” he said.

At the outset of his report, Miranda noted that “for many months, Kaylee has been denying that anyone ever had touched her ... and was basically avoidant around the issue of sexual behavior.”

One of the lessons of the McMartin case and others is that children, if repeatedly prompted, will say almost anything they think adults want to hear.

“When you interview children, you have to be very cautious,” Coleman said. “Now that I’m a professional, I can see that this is an abuse, bombarding a child with this information.” By repeatedly asking Kaylee if she was abused, Miranda might have helped plant the idea in her head, Coleman believes.

Miranda, who is still practicing in Miami, did not return repeated telephone calls.

In the end, Kaylee’s story comes down to a matter of trust, of faith. With few events documented, with the most compelling information coming from a psychologist hired by the grandparents, the search for proof follows the same path as the road that runs past the Lopezes’ old home: straight into a swamp.

Capozzola insists the grandparents are heroes who should be rewarded, not punished, for what they did, even if it was illegal.

Law enforcement authorities disagree. At the same time, they have made it clear that the Lopezes are not likely to face long prison terms for their crimes.

State officials in Florida have charged the Lopezes with interference with custody, a crime that carries a maximum three-year sentence. “The likelihood is that they’d be facing less than that,” said Ed Griffith, a spokesman for the state’s attorney.

The Lopezes also face federal charges of interstate flight to avoid prosecution. But an FBI spokeswoman said the agency usually drops such charges once fugitives are in custody facing state charges.

Capozzola said he wants to negotiate a deal for the grandparents that would spare them prison time.

Raul Jr. said he doesn’t want to see his parents behind bars, but does want to see them admit they were wrong, “so we can be a family again.”

He desperately wants to see his daughter, although he knows she doesn’t want to see him. He is willing to wait until she is ready, he said.

So is Coleman. It will take time, she knows, for Kaylee to come to terms with what has happened. “I’ve learned to be very patient,” she said.

Out of the Shadows

Kaylee’s story is a surprisingly common one.

“There are thousands of these families who are either coming out or right at the stage of coming out,” said Alan Rosenfeld, a Colorado attorney who has represented parents in the underground.

A support group, Take Root, has been established by a woman in Portland, Ore., who was abducted three times in her adolescence -- once by her father, twice by her mother. Liss Hart-Haviv, 34, said people who were abducted by family members tend to have problems with identity and loyalty.

“We spend our lives trying to grow up and put it behind us, which you can’t really do,” she said. “You can’t just sweep it under the rug.”

Kaylee Lopez said her life was fine until she turned 18 and realized that in order to live a normal life, she would have to step out of the shadows, despite the risk to her grandparents. She has been taking college classes and preparing for a high school equivalency exam. It was her desire to apply to colleges that led her to want to reclaim her legal identity; admission officers, she feared, would see through her alias.

“I grew up like a normal kid,” she said. “I went to school, I had my friends, I had my home, you know, I had my room. I grew up with a normal life, and now everything’s going insane. I can’t have a normal life anymore.”

Remarkably, she said she is not angry at her parents. “I’m hurt, I’m upset, I’m maybe a little miffed,” she said. “I should be trying to kill someone. But I don’t want to. I just want to get on with my life.”

Through Capozzola’s efforts, she has been removed from state and national missing children lists. She plans soon to move out of her grandparents’ house, a change she views with trepidation. She has asked Capozzola to help her legally change her name to Rosa Aurora Lopez.

Rosa, she said, is an old family name. Aurora is her grandmother’s given name, later Anglicized to Irene.

Aurora is also the Roman goddess of dawn, who dragged light across the sky in her chariot. It seems a fitting inspiration for a young woman, long in the shadows, who is struggling to bring light to her own new day.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

A child’s odyssey

Kaylee Lopez’s grandparents abducted her when she was 5 and moved across the country, using assumed names and forged documents to elude capture. Here is a look at the first phase of their flight, pieced together from interviews and legal documents.

Aug. 11, 1989

Irene and Raul Lopez Sr. pick up Kaylee in the afternoon from her mother’s house in south Florida and promise to return her that evening. Instead, they flee.

Aug. 12, 1989

In Atlanta, they hook up with an underground group that assists people who have abducted children to protect them from abuse. Their next stop: North Carolina

October 1989

They drive to New York, where the grandparents and Kaylee appear in disguise on the “Geraldo” show. They return to North Carolina. They head cross-country, stopping in Detroit, then South Dakota, where they visit Mt. Rushmore.

December 1989

They pass through Oklahoma, then settle in Texas. They leave Texas about eight months later after fliers seeking information about Kaylee are distributed in the area where they are living.

August 1990

They reach Southern California, where they spend the next 12 years -- part of it in a trailer park near Disneyland.