A Tucson father separated from his infant more than 17 years ago, has found his son on MySpace.

It was right after high school in 1990 when IX (pronounced Nine) Mendoza had a baby boy named Chea, “My whole life I’d always wanted a family. I was very happy to have a child even though I was very young so I was desperate to get things together and make it work out.”

He became even more desperate when the infant and his mother disappeared to Oklahoma.

Mendoza says, “I had no idea where they were. I had no phone numbers, no contacts and I couldn’t get any of the family members that I did have contacts for on her side to return my calls or accept my calls.”

Over the past 17 years, he searched for the child, but his searches always turned up nothing. The trail went cold.

Then as the internet started to grow, Mendoza kept searching, this time on the world wide web. Mendoza kept tapping away, searching every site he could think of that might lead him to his son Chea.

“AOL chat rooms, gaming chat rooms and anything I could. I heard a story about MySpace.com on NPR, about how big it was with kids,” says Mendoza.

He signed up for a MySpace account in 2006 and ran a search, but couldn’t find his son’s unique name. A year later, he checked back, and much to his surpise, there was a profile on there with the same name as his sons!

His son who he hasn’t seen in 16 years was on MySpace.

Mendoza wrote a comment on his son’s profile with an entry that neither he nor his son will ever forget, “Sorry to post on such a public forum but I’m anxious to get in touch with you soon. Love, your father IX Mendoza.”

Chea Mitchell says, “Everyone was sitting down for dinner. I was checking my MySpace account and I get the comment saying it’s from my dad with a phone number. I just stared at the screen for a while and said, ‘Hey, mom. That’s his name, right?’”

They talked on the phone. Mendoza tells us, “It was just like old friends that had been apart for a little while.”

Even though Mendoza hasn’t seen Chea since he was an infant, there was an instant connection. He says, “We really like zombie movies and sci-fi movies.”

Eventually, Chea came to visit. He says, “I had all these brothers and sisters coming at me and hugging me and it was pretty epic.”

Chea recently moved in with his Father and is a freshman at the University of Arizona studying English.

Source: KVOA Arizona Link filed under Weird U.S. News