Reunion after 37 years bittersweet

Nerves twisted Tammy Arrington's stomach into knots on the trip from Palm Springs to North Las Vegas.

She was going to meet her mother for the first time since she was a child, and she found the ride was unbearable. She made her aunt pull over so she could throw up. Then she called her mom on a cell phone.

"All we did was cry," Arrington, 42, said.

It had been 37 years since Arrington was held by her mother, Marlana Lozano. Arrington was 5 years old when she was snatched by her father from a restaurant parking lot.

Mother and daughter reunited Feb. 7 at Lozano's North Las Vegas home.

But the reunion is bittersweet.

Arrington has been fighting full-blown AIDS since 2001. The disease and years of drug use have wasted her body. Her ribs and shoulders jut from her tiny frame, and only children's clothing will fit.

"How do you meet your mom and say you're dying and that you have to mourn for me again?" Arrington said. "She's so positive about everything, and I sit here and tell her it's not going to work."

Outside a North Las Vegas Starbucks, both women cried gently in each others' arms as they told their story.

They apologized to each other for lost time and chatted about a fulfilling future together. The hardest part for them, it seems, isn't telling their story; it's the realization that they're running out of time as Arrington's health worsens.

"I just got my baby back, and I'm afraid I'll lose her again," Lozano said.

Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, said it's important to realize the reunion of a missing child and her family can be a difficult transition.

"You can't expect 'happily ever after' from the first moment," Allen said. "You have to realize in these kinds of cases, a significant block of this child's life has been stolen. It's tough but hopeful."

Back in 1973, the parents were going through a heated custody battle and messy divorce, which Lozano blamed on her husband's domestic violence and drug abuse. She said she fled from him because he broke her neck, ribs and fingers, busted her nose twice and cracked her tailbone when he kicked her with steel-toed shoes.

Lozano said her family was on vacation in Redondo Beach, Calif., when Robert Arrington sprinted through a parking lot and swept Tammy into his vehicle.

Lozano searched for her ex-husband, but each time she found the new house where he was keeping Tammy, he had packed up and moved without a trace.

There were no milk carton photos of missing children and no Amber Alerts to aid in Lozano's search for her daughter in the 1970s. There was no comprehensive way to circulate photos of missing children then, Allen said.

"You couldn't enter missing children information into the FBI database, and most police departments had mandatory waiting periods where they thought children were just runaways," Allen said. "The taking of a child by a noncustodial parent was a civil matter of which they wouldn't get involved, and it wasn't a crime in every state in the 1970s."

Federal laws were enacted in the 1980s that created a database of missing children information. In 1984, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children was created.

Meanwhile, Arrington said she was growing up with a father who dealt and used drugs. He introduced her to freebase cocaine -- which is like high-grade crack -- when she was just 13 years old.

Lozano kept looking. She contacted various law enforcement agencies in California and the FBI but they didn't come up with any solid leads. After several years, she accepted that her daughter was dead and tried to move on with her life, eventually leaving California and coming to North Las Vegas. But her instincts told her to continue looking for her daughter.

Arrington ended up on the streets and bounced in and out of prison for 18 years, mostly on drug-related charges. She ended up living in a tent behind a strip mall in Palm Springs. She went Dumpster diving for clothes and collected cans for money when she wasn't too sick. She tried looking for work, she said, but no one would hire a terminally ill ex-convict.

"For me, is it OK to die now?" Arrington said. "I'm wondering why I'm still here suffering. So it's OK to rest. But no, it's OK to start again, I think. And that's where I'm undecided. I'm not talking suicide, but you get so tired. You just want to lay down and go to sleep and say, 'OK God, no more.'

"But now it might be time for me to live the life I never had."

Arrington had thought she was alone. She'd been out of contact with her mother for so long, she figured she was dead -- as her father had told her for years. He died in 2004 from pancreatic cancer just three weeks after completing his last prison term, and all his relatives were dead.

Hoping to make a connection with someone from her mother's family, Arrington plugged her name into a genealogy Web site. She was contacted by her aunt within three weeks.

"R U MY NIECE? Tammy, the family has been searching for over 30 years. ... Your Mother is still alive and searching for u," the e-mail read.

She got in touch right away.

"The Internet has really provided a way to reconnect and help people find each other and find themselves," Allen said.

In the back of Lozano's mind, she never gave up hope that her daughter was alive and she would see her again.

But the joy of their reunion is tempered with the reality of her daughter's health.

Lozano works as an assistant at the College of Southern Nevada through a Social Security employment program, making about $1,140 a month. She cannot afford the prescription AIDS drugs that her daughter received for free in prison.

And Arrington is having trouble battling the bureaucracy to qualify for programs such as Medicaid. The latest roadblock: She can't afford the money -- or the six-month wait -- to get her birth certificate from California, which she needs to secure a Nevada ID.

"I want to spend more than a year with her; I really do. I want to get to know her more than I do," Lozano said. "To me, it's the happiest moment of my life. I have my baby back, for however long it is."

Contact Kristi Jourdan at kjourdan@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0279.