This story really made me angry. Hopefully it will have a better ending.
Army Sgt. Steven Garcia is a patrol supervisor with a military police unit, but the fight of his young life isn't on a battlefield. He's fighting for custody of a child who isn't his, biologically. From Seoul, South Korea, where he's stationed, that's a hard battle to win.
When his now-estranged wife, Marina Garcia, told him she was pregnant during his deployment, Steven assumed he was the father, he told KVOA. Then, when Marina told him their daughter died at birth, he initially believed that, too.
"It was pretty emotional. We cried quite a bit together over the phone," Steven told the station. "It was devastating."
But the baby was born on Feb. 2, at Canyon Vista Medical Center in Sierra Vista, Arizona. It's actually a boy, but he was not fathered by Steven, 24. Being overseas made it that much harder to cut through all the lies back home.
While Marina, 31, tried to hide the truth from Steven and his family, police say she was conspiring with a couple from the small town of Kenedy, Texas, to sell the little boy and forge paperwork to give Alex and Leslie Hernandez legal parental rights, according to the Sierra Vista Herald.
According to Arizona Range News, Marina and the Hernandez couple arranged to make the sale using Facebook Messenger.
Three days after the little boy was born, an Arizona Department of Public Safety officer pulled over the couple along Interstate 10 near Wilcox, Ariz. The baby was in the car with them, but they eventually let it slip that they were not the child's biological parents.
Alex Hernandez, 33, pleaded guilty to forgery in April for signing the boy's birth certificate as father. Leslie Hernandez pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit forgery,