Vincent protecting a child in the folds of his gown. A state-run institution that housed about thirty-five boys and girls, most of whom had been either removed from dysfunctional families or abandoned, the shelter was in an old stone building with peeling white wooden shutters on the roof was a statue of St. Vincent de Paul shelter in the nearby city of Pau. Finally, he fled to France, where his mother had grown up.įrench authorities placed Francisco at the St.
The crash left him in a coma for several weeks and, upon recovering, he was sent to live with an uncle, who abused him. Initially, he barely spoke, but after some prodding he revealed that his parents and younger brother had been killed in a car accident. He had no money and carried little more than a cell phone and an I.D., which said that his name was Francisco Hernandez Fernandez and that he was born on December 13, 1989, in Cáceres, Spain. Slender and short, with pale skin and trembling hands, he wore a muffler around much of his face and had a baseball cap pulled over his eyes. Another hot line received a similar call, and the boy eventually arrived, by himself, at a local government child-welfare office. He frantically explained that he was a tourist passing through Orthez, near the western Pyrenees, and that at the train station he had encountered a fifteen-year-old boy who was alone, and terrified. On May 3, 2005, in France, a man called an emergency hot line for missing and exploited children. you do not become one.” Photograph by François-Marie Banier Bourdin once wrote, “When you fight monsters, be careful that . . .
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