Gina M. Garcia is a member of a club other than 1%: the abducted children returned to their families.
In 1981, when he was eight, Garcia, a male who loved baseball, was captured from a mall in Orlando, Florida.
“I remember a Lionel Playworld across the street. I had a kangaroo pet that I watched all the time I was being sexually assaulted, ”he told The Post. Her kidnapper was leaving with her when another car put up a stop sign, forcing the man to brake and escaping Garcia.
As devastating as the experience was, it would take about 25 years for Garcia to understand the truth.
This is because a police detective told his parents not to discuss what had happened to Garcia. “No one wanted to talk about it, so I didn’t raise it,” he said.
But, all the while, his soul was secretly eaten away and he would eventually consume it to the point that he could not live the day to day.
Once he finally began to explore the truth, he made a shocking discovery: as one lawyer pointed out, his case bears remarkable resemblance to one of the most infamous child abduction cases of the last 40 years, the 6-year-old. old Adam Walsh, murdered son of the TV show “America’s Most Wanted,” John Walsh. Even John Walsh himself believes that the same sick man captured Garcia and Adam.
“It simply came to our notice then. There are so many parallels, “Walsh told The Post.” His case is very similar [Adam’s]”.
Now, with the guidance of her mentor, “Wonder Woman” director Patty Jenkins, Garcia has made a film about her experience. “Untold: This Is My Story” will premiere in Los Angeles on September 6 at the Dances With Films Festival.
Since only 1% of abducted children get home, Garcia knows how lucky he is: “Statistically speaking, he shouldn’t be alive.”
Garcia grew up in a military family. His father, Charlie, was a Puerto Rican fighter pilot who flew more than 100 missions into enemy territory under the guise of Air America, a CIA division. Her mother was a beauty queen whose father, a World War II prisoner of war, received a purple heart. Gina was born while her father was stationed in Tehran, Iran, but the family, including her two older sisters and a brother, fled the country in 1978 before the Islamic revolution.
Finally, they settled in Florida, where on the night of October 12, 1981 Garcia spent a “girls night” with his mother and sister at the Orlando Fashion Square Mall. While her mother was paying a bill at Sears, 8-year-old Gina and her 18-year-old brother were at a bookstore. Everyone had to meet at Orange Julius to enjoy it later. But while her sister was examining, a man approached Gina.
“He crashed into my ass while I was sitting on the floor,” said Garcia, who was working on a science project. He tossed a badge, telling him he was safe and that he had some books about Saturn in his car. “I followed him because I wanted to get a good grade,” Garcia recalled. “There were no screams or screams.”
Things turned around when they got to the car. “He went from a nice guy to a monster,” he said. The man pushed her inside and, with a knife attached to her small body, raped her.
He was driving her out of the parking lot when Garcia was able to jump out of the car. With his pants down and barefoot, he ran back to the mall and found his sister, who hadn’t even noticed that the girl was missing. Security searched her mother and police were alerted.
A rape team detected semen and police found a stolen car with the attacker’s hat on, but “they threw it all away,” Garcia said. Although a police report was filed, police told her parents to only thank her for being alive. “They were more concerned with returning the stolen car than with proper investigation,” Garcia said.
A spokesman for the Orlando police department told The Post: “The records. . . they show that in October 1981 an investigation was carried out using all the resources available at that time. On October 26, 1981, the detective assigned to Gina Garcia’s case designated this investigation as “inactive,” pending further evidence and / or referrals. “
Garcia went to bed that night in the bunks he shared with his brother, Michael, and missed a couple of days of school.
“I returned home, there was no story. It’s not like it’s today, ”Garcia said.“ My mom was going to take it [the truth] to the grave. I assaulted the assault ”.
At first it looked good. Garcia hosted his elementary school news. She was later elected president of the Student Council and practiced various sports in high school. But under his plate, there were cracks.
He was secretly confronting his homosexuality, after a first-year secret affair with his male basketball coach. She also had undiagnosed dyslexia, which caused her to drop out of high school. After getting his GED and getting a softball scholarship to Seminole College, Garcia also dropped out.
“Every time I pulled forward, it would self-destruct,” he said. “I would do things unintentionally to destroy myself.”
Romantic relationships always seemed doomed: “I couldn’t look anyone in the eye,” she recalled, and struggled with weight issues. Being heavy, he said, was “a way to protect myself. I wanted to be invisible at least. “
Garcia joined the Navy and, as a non-commissioned officer, was assigned to NATO, obtaining a high-level authorization working in computer logistics and weapons tracking for submarines.
She left the military as a disabled veterinarian due to a sports injury at age 23 and opened a bike shop in Orlando. But when the business was hit by a series of breaks, Garcia had a surprise reaction: a wave of debilitating flashbacks of his childhood trauma.
“I literally thought I was going crazy. I couldn’t get off the couch, I couldn’t work. I kept seeing that face, “she said, adding that she was also struck by the ghostly smells and tastes.” I thought she was losing her mind. But it had nothing to do with the breaks and everything to do with it. with the kidnapping “.
He only recalled the 2006 aggression with the help of a therapist. “I knew they were taking me out of a bookstore though. . . I literally blocked everything, ”he said.
In 2008, at age 36, Garcia looked at his police report for the first time, thanks to a friend who was a lawyer in the city of Orlando.
“The answers to what happened to me, I read them from my eight-year-old self,” he said.
But when his lawyer friend read the file, he gasped, “Oh my God, yours [case] it’s like Adam Walsh’s. “
Adam was 6 years old when he was abducted from a Hollywood, Florida mall on July 27, 1981, less than three months before Garcia’s capture. After a two-week search that drew attention across the country, a fisherman discovered the boy’s severed head in a canal between Hollywood and Orlando, where Garcia would later be kidnapped.
Garcia said that, like Adam, “I was sodomized. [The attacker] I thought he was a small child. I was a little boy. The only difference is that someone put up a stop sign, my kidnapper stopped and I left ”.
She refuses to insist on the identity of her attacker, but said: “I know for sure that I was abducted two and a half months after Adam’s abduction. There are similar behaviors.”
Adam’s father, John Walsh, becomes an outspoken advocate for missing children and the host of “America’s Most Wanted.” He continued to search for answers in his son’s case for three decades before, in 2008, Hollywood police determined that the killer was Ottis Toole, a serial killer who had died in prison in 1996 while serving five life sentences for other homicides.
In 2020, while promoting his “In Pursuit with John Walsh” program, Adam’s father described Toole as a “serial predator who roamed this country for years and caught children all over this country.”
Walsh told The Post: “It sounds logical [that Toole could have kidnapped Garcia]. I was in the area. It was the age he liked. “
Garcia met John Walsh in 2014 and gave him a first cut of his film. Later, his assistant told him that he quickly turned it off. “I don’t know if it was a trigger for him,” Garcia said. “It didn’t go through so much of the film and I understand why.”
Garcia is now 48 years old and single and living in the Gulf of Mexico in Florida. She is the CEO of Trikaroo, a micro scooter brand.
He admits that for a time he had resentment against his family for burying his truth. Her sister, who was supposed to look at Garcia when they left her, left home after the kidnapping. The last time they were seen was in 2012. “It had not yet been processed [what happened]”Garcia said.
Her father died in 1995, but today Garcia says her relationships with the rest of the family have never been better.
“I do not blame the police for giving bad advice to my mother. I don’t blame my sister, “Garcia said.” The only guilty person is the one who took me. “
He created The Untold Project, a charity to help PTSD sexual trauma survivors safely tell their own stories.
When she decided to turn her life experience into a film, Garcia turned to her friend and mentor, “Wonder Woman” director Jenkins, whom Gina had met in 2011.
“I asked him to direct my film,” Garcia said. Jenkins replied, “Absolutely not. You have to tell your story. She needs to be directed. “When Garcia argued she wasn’t a director, Jenkins told her,” You’ll be there when you’re done. “
Famous lawyer Gloria Allred debuts as an actor in “Untold,” playing an injured veteran.
“I admire her and her persistence,” Allred told The Post of Garcia, whom she met through Terri Ivens, the “All My Children” actress who plays Garcia in the film. “Children often have no voice when they are sexually abused. There is a trauma in his life for many years that they try to understand.
It has only happened since Garcia knew his truth that he can move forward.
“It will be 40 years in October. I can’t continue living in the past, “he said. “I am in a great space, both physically and emotionally. Every day passed on October 12, 1981 is a success, [because] I’m above the ground. “