“I guess the shock was more that the whole time I didn’t think it was that person and that’s who it really was,” Araceli Diaz said. It was his daughter, saying she had found Michele Martinez, and sent the pink dress photo electronically for confirmation. “I started thinking, why didn’t I call Araceli a week ago … then the phone rang in my hand.” Two days before his heart surgery in October, Miguel sat in the yard of his Las Vegas home thinking that if something happened to him during the procedure, his twins would never see him again. “He said, ‘I love you guys, but I wish I had my other two kids here opening gifts as well.’ ”Īs the years passed, Miguel asked his daughter to look for his twins online. He got up and went into the hallway area and I asked him, ‘What’s going on?’ ” she recalled. One Christmas Day more than a decade ago, Araceli Diaz noticed that her father looked very sad.
On another visit, the children and their great-grandmother had disappeared. Miguel said he visited his twins periodically, one day giving money to their great-grandmother to take them for their school photos - including the one in which Martinez wore a pink dress. He kept the arrangement that way, waiting for the day their mother would be released. When he eventually found the children in Wilmington, they were under the care of their great-grandmother because their mother was incarcerated. His uncle later told him the pregnant woman, Maryann, gave birth to twins, and they were his. “I was thinking, I don’t know who it would be,” he said. A friend told him that four people - two men and two women, one of them pregnant - had been looking for him. Miguel soon moved to Oxnard when he returned to Harbor City a few months later, Maryann was gone. Miguel lived in the Harbor Hills housing project in Lomita when, at about 17 years old, he met Maryann Olivia Martinez, who lived in nearby Harbor City. “I never stopped looking for them,” he said recently in Spanish. I just felt so peaceful, and my life changed.”īut Martinez and her brother were always on Miguel Angel Diaz’s mind. “Something came over me - it was like this calmness, it’s so hard to describe. He was kind of in shock I was in shock,” recounted Martinez, 37. 10, Martinez called her father and heard his voice for the first time in three decades. It was the month leading up to the election, when Araceli Diaz - a Torrance resident who had glossed over the Santa Ana councilwoman’s Facebook page for supervisor several times while looking for anyone with the name “Michele Martinez” - finally clicked on it and found a familiar picture of a 7-year-old Martinez wearing a pink dress.ĭiaz recognized the photo was the same as one at the home of her father, Miguel Angel Diaz, 57, who was due for open-heart surgery two days later.Īraceli Diaz, 33, sent a Facebook message to Martinez and her twin brother: Their long-lost dad was trying to get in touch. Michele Martinez may have lost her bid for the Orange County Board of Supervisors in November, but her campaign brought her something that turned out to be even more life-changing.
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